Steve Melito

It’s always a good idea to go through several drafts of any design before finalizing a part. Prototyping can help you get the right design, but you’ll need a different type of draft for a successful injection molded plastics project. In injection molding, draft is the angle that you apply to the vertical walls of […]

Flash. It’s what you get when there’s a problem with your injection mold or with the injection molding process itself. Although flash can be addressed during post-processing, you may decide that it’s better to prevent mold flash in the first place. That’s often a function of tooling costs since flash-free molds are more expensive. For […]

Is your injection molding project ready for success? Sure, you’ve thought about most of the injection molding manufacturing process. You’ve designed your mold with care, researched and selected the right material, and finished your CAD file or part drawing. But have you considered the type of injection molding gate to use? A gate might seem […]

ABS is a commonly used plastic injection molding material with three main ingredients: acrylonitrile, butadiene, and styrene. Each of these monomers imparts specific properties and provides ABS terpolymer with a robust combination of features. The “A” in ABS, acrylonitrile, imparts hardness and heat and chemical resistance. The “B”, which stands for butadiene, provides toughness and […]

Post-processing improves the properties of plastic injection molded parts so that they are ready for end-use. It includes corrective actions that remove surface defects and secondary processes for decorative or functional purposes. For example, post molding operations can remove excess material (known as flash) or apply part numbers. As its name suggests, post-processing always occurs […]

Plastic injection molding materials have names that sound like terms from chemistry class. It’s hard enough that polyethylene rhymes with polypropylene, which has an abbreviation (PP) that’s similar to polystyrene (PS). Choosing the right injection molding material also means knowing your application requirements, which can change between prototyping and production. Fortunately, you don’t need a […]

这并不总是很容易,但是别让那难度n it needs to be. Moving from 3D printing to injection molding isn’t as simple as just using your computer-aided design (CAD) file with a different piece of equipment. Because 3D printing offers greater design freedom than injection molding, you may need to modify your CAD […]