Lou Young walks through Atomex's injection molding shop in Detroit, showing off a 1,000-ton press, a 500-ton, and a 240-ton machine. Every mold they make is packed with sensors that feed data into AI models to improve tooling design. They produce everything from phone cases to drone parts.
To get a feel for how tool and die making works, we did a manufacturing stroll with Atomex co-founder Lou Young.
This is the injection molding machine. So it's a 1,000-ton injection press, 500-ton. We have a 240-ton over there. Each one of these machines is unique for us because every injection tool we build, we put a lot of sensors in it because of getting back that data while we're running. It trains our models further. There's molds to make cell phone cases here. There's drone components. Anything that you can think about, a plastic, essentially gets built in one of these types of molds. And each one of these molds is its own complicated engineering problem.
