AIM Processing Small Plastic Parts Blog

Many factors go into determining the overall cost of producing your custom injection molded parts. First there’s the product design, development, and iterative prototyping process if required. Once your design is finalized, next up is the tooling cost to build your mold that will be used to make your product. Even once manufacturing is underway, a number of factors will still dramatically affect your ongoing production costs: material type, material usage, and machine cycle time to name a few.

Keeping all of these factors in mind, AIM Processing strives to minimize your costs at every step in the production process.

Breaking Down the Common Costs of Custom Injection Molding:

Product Design and Prototyping

Extensive costs can go into product development and prototyping. Nevertheless, these processes are critical to the success and cost-efficiency of your overall project. A good, validated plan is important to ensure that your end product meets all performance and aesthetic expectations. Recognizing the potential for variability in the dimensions of interfacing components, we can work with you to build this flexibility into your design and optimize your products for manufacturability along the way.

For example, that means we use designs that minimize material usage. Features like ribs and gussets can make a part stronger while using less material. Even a small reduction multiplied by the many parts in a production run and potentially many production runs can add up to big savings. More on material savings below.

Leveraging strong relationships with our material distribution partners, we can help identify the material with the best balance of technical performance, cost, and availability.  While there are many resources for technical selection, obtaining information about cost and availability is nearly impossible without working with a material distributor.

As another example, we always ensure an optimum draft angle. Parts that have the appropriate amount of draft allow faster ejection to minimize your cycle time and maximize throughput.

Custom Tooling Costs

The next major cost in your custom injection molding project is the price of developing and building the mold tooling. Just like with your product designs, efficient and effective mold designs are required to ensure end product quality as well as production efficiency.

At AIM, we carefully consider mold longevity in your design. Building a durable tool will not only offer a longer life to your program but it will reduce the painful slip in quality as your tool ages and wears. Selecting the right tool material to support your plastic material is vital but a common corner to cut by molders and toolmakers to get the business. This can end up costing you double if you need to rebuild your tool at a later date. We consider all features of a mold will allow it to hold up over time as you continue to produce parts. That in effect spreads out your mold tooling costs over a much larger volume of products during its lifetime.

Material Costs

We always strive to use materials that meet your end product requirements without grossly exceeding them using needlessly high-cost materials. While it’s critical that your raw materials meet your performance and aesthetic requirements, using resins that go far above those requirements is generally just wasting money.

Secondary Processes

Secondary processes can add extensive costs and complications to any project – e.g. custom inserts, post-production machining, finishing, painting, are necessary in some cases. Of course, these features are often necessary for the end product. However, in other cases, changes to design or materials can accomplish the same goals without the additional setup fees. The same is true for mechanisms. Many types of mechanisms, like living hinges for example, can be created in the molding process rather than after the fact.

End-to-End Plastic Injection Molding Services

Based in the Denver, Colorado region since 1993, AIM Processing is one of the leading injection molding companies in the Western US and beyond. By following strict guidelines and quality control procedures, we ensure all of our customers receive the highest quality products manufactured to their specifications and delivered on time.