Two Products from One Injection Mold 

Thank you. Now I have the term I can use to find them.

@@JohnSL you can buy those from DME,DMS or from PCS. They also have CAD designs for all the mold components they sell.

Using a valve to switch the flow is a whole lot faster than changing inserts, which means the long-term labor is a lot lower. Injection molding companies typically charge a setup fee each time you run a set of parts. That means the setup fee would be higher if they had to change the inserts.

Yes, you could just swap inserts to make the other version using a smaller mold base. However, you will need to remove the mold base from the injection molding machine to do the insert changeover. By adding the valve you negate the costly changeover time (and machine downtime) by spending a little more on a slightly larger mold base and added valve which allows the machine to make parts continuously for either design. In the end, the valve/larger mold base method is the more efficient and more profitable option.

For several reasons. One is that this mold required the use not just of a mill, but also of an EDM machine (which I don't have). Another is that milling is just part of the work. The rest involves the placement of ejector pins, fitting the inserts into mold bases, etc. Also, it would take a lot of time. Since this was a project being paid for by another company, I was far more comfortable letting the experts make this mold.

​@@JohnSL thanks for the insightful answer. i'm building a product right now, and your channel has been a massive help. the cost of injection molding is so daunting, and i always dream of being able to do it myself. but i realize now, maybe, there's no way around it

I've heard of MIM but never learned enough about it to know how it works.

This is way too large for my Morgan. The molds were made and all the injection molding is being done at Texlon Plastics in Gastonia, NC.

I have rarely had that issue. The only time I've seen this happen is when the plastic stays in the cylinder at temperature for too long without injecting parts. This allows the heat to rise and soften the pellets at the time. When the machine is under normal use, the top is cooler, and you want to therefore have unmelted pellets at the top.

No, these were made by Texlon, who are also doing the injection molding. I covered this in some other videos. Here is one of them: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FQA5Efo9mBw.html