Function and Importance of Mold Design
Mold quotation, mold design and mold manufacturing support a huge product development process. When the quotation of tooling and/or parts is required, it usually means the beginning of the conceptual design stage or the detailed design stage.
In addition to materials and processes, the design of an injection mold plays a crucial role in determining the success or failure of a set of molds. In other words, if the design of the injection mold is not good, the worst result may be that there is no way to mass produce large products.
Of course, in the process of injection mold design, if we can avoid some key problems and do a good job in the preliminary work, the quality of the mold can still be guaranteed. For example, the professional team needs to review the mold before production to determine that the mold is good for mold injection, ejector pin and parting. Evaluate the feasibility of the mold. The controversial areas should be carefully considered to reduce the problems caused by improper injection mold design.
At this time, if the mold engineer or mold maker has given a fully detailed design, it is somewhat unreasonable, because:
A lot of work in the early stage of mold design is carried out simultaneously with the imperfect product design;
For the sake of manufacturing process or product performance, the mold design may need to be greatly modified.
The mold development process usually starts from the initial design lacking details. If the initial design is directly used, it may lead to the production of unsatisfactory products. The design information of key parts required for the initial mold design includes part size, wall thickness and expected production volume.
Based on this information, mold designers can develop the initial mold layout, give cost estimates, and give product design improvements. In order to speed up the product development process, mold design and mold parts procurement and customization can be carried out at the same time.
When the product development phase is about to end, the mold manufacturing and debugging phase begins. For this reason, mold manufacturers and suppliers are under great pressure to provide high-quality molds as soon as possible. This task is very challenging because there are potential errors in the product design process.
Therefore, mold designers may be required to redesign and modify part of the mold and cooperate with mold manufacturers to determine whether the mold meets the production requirements.