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.

Today’s complex injection molded parts often require more complicated designs with more contours and more walls throughout. This can complicate fill patterns, cause unexpected voids/gas traps, and introduce warp. As a result, it has become increasingly critical to ensure uniformity so that the end products offer the expected strength and performance they are designed for. That’s where mold flow analysis comes in.

Embarking on a new custom injection molding project can be intimidating, especially for customers who are new to the industry. If you’ve never seen the process through from start to finish, it can seem extremely complex and even overwhelming with all of the details you’re expected to bring to the table.

Today’s advanced injection molding techniques take an intelligent, disciplined approach to the manufacturing process that ensures both higher precision and efficiency. Making the right choice between hot runner manifold systems and conventional cold runners is just one of the many considerations we make. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most critical decisions in order to optimize our injection molding methods for your unique products and volume requirements.

Maintaining precision and repeatability is crucial to any custom injection molding project, especially when it comes to small parts with potentially complex designs. With small part injection molding, even the tiniest variance in a dimension outside of a tolerance range can ruin a whole run of products.

Plastic overmolding is a complex manufacturing process that involves multiple steps of injecting two different materials into a single final, molded part. As you can imagine, adding additional steps and materials into the injection molding process comes with some unique complications and challenges.

The overmolding process is indispensable for a myriad of today’s plastic products. Essentially, overmolding services allow us to combine multiple materials into a single complex design. And despite the inherent carbon footprint created by custom plastics manufacturing, overmolding can actually be the more efficient process compared to the alternative of producing and assembling multiple separate components.

Conventional injection molding and overmolding are both crucial processes in the realm of modern plastics manufacturing. The production processes are similar, but overmolding isn’t as simple as injecting one plastic material over top of another. It requires a specialized mold setup along with the unique procedure of placing the substrate (the initial injection molded part) precisely into an overmold cavity before injecting the second material.

Optimizing product design is crucial to the success of any custom injection molding project. However, when it comes to molding small parts and miniature components, there are some specific design considerations to keep in mind.

Part of the AIM Processing process is design for manufacturability (DFM) – taking your initial product designs and ensuring that no part features will pose an issue once the plastic meets the mold. By carefully considering all design features and tolerances alongside critical injection molding considerations like draft angle and material selection, we minimize manufacturing errors while ensuring a more efficient production process.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the critical design considerations you should make when it comes to small part injection molding.

The Denver, Colorado region has been a western hub for manufacturing since the early days of the city, and particularly for plastic injection molding since the industry took off in the 1960s. AIM Processing came along in 1993, adding to the long history of quality and innovation that the “Made in Colorado” stamp stands for.