Launching a Product - How do I prototype for injection molding?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today we're going to be talking about how to prototype for injection molding. It's something that a lot of people have asked me over the years. Well, how can we prototype? How do we know that the part's going to be good before I go spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars on tooling? And I've worked on projects where tooling has cost a couple thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars for every single part to be made in terms of just tooling costs. That's not even production costs. That's just the forms and the molds and the tooling required to make the parts. And so when you want to— when you're going to end up investing that much, you want to make sure that you know the part's going to be good and it's going to actually work. And so there's a few different options we're going to go over. We're going to go over 3D printing. as well as urethane molding and a few other odds and ends in, in terms of options that occasionally I've used in the past in order to get some good prototyping done for a part before we actually go to injection molding. So to start off, I really want to quickly go over injection molding. Injection molding is a process using pellets that get superheated, use a screw, injected into a form, an actual metal tooling, and then that cavity is The shape of the lower part, and it works really, really well. There's some amazing new materials that are biodegradable plastics and non-petroleum-based plastics. There's also metal injection molding. Metal injection molding is kind of its own section just because it is metal, and prototyping that Depending on the complexity, casting can be used for prototyping metal injection parts, also called MIMs. Casting, you know, there's many different kinds of casting, but something like investment casting is an option that we've looked at, you know, where your tooling costs, you know, is going to be a little bit more necessarily for your one part, but you— it's a one-use one-time use form. You can get it made, you get it produced, you have the actual part in the shape that's going to be. That way you can test it. You can often use the exact same metal that you're going to use, so it's basically an identical part just made in a different way. If at all possible, CNC lathing, other machining processes is ideal. Those are much cheaper. oftentimes than casting, and especially rather than injection molding for metals. So if that's possible, we use those options. Otherwise, you know, metal injection molding, if you do need to do that, if that's the part, is often used as an actual cost reduction process for parts that are already being cast. Casting at the highest levels is able to produce parts with incredible accuracy, and sometimes very large parts that you cannot injection mold. So injection molding, in my experience, has been used more when you have a really high production rate of a part that could be cast. Then you use metal injection molding because it's going to be cheaper at a mass scale than doing any other type of manufacturing. So on the plastics and, you know, whether biodegradable Or not on the plastic side. There's a few different ways. One is obviously 3D printing, and you can do that for metal, but that's even 3D printing metal. It's— it can be very expensive. So 3D printing is really great. It has some drawbacks in that it is layers. There's a few processes that aren't complete layers, but you're finishing— you always have to do Post-finishing to any 3D printed part in order to have it identical to what you might put into a mold, especially if you do texturing. So if your product has texturing on it, 3D printing will get you the general form. But if you want an actual prototype going to use— It's a fit, function, and form prototype. And you need it in the right plastic, 3D printing will get you most of the way there. And there's some amazing work that you can do in post-finishing. I've seen amazing parts that have come from 3D printing. It's incredible, but it won't be identical to injection molding. And so one of the processes that we can do when doing plastics is using urethane casting. And basically it's You create a urethane mold. You use that mold to cast a plastic. You can also do some injection molding with urethane, or you can even 3D print your urethane mold. Of course, it'll have texturing on it that'll be according to you know whatever the 3D printing process is. But you can 3D print a mold and then injection mold into it, which is. Quite fascinating and possible, but you can also just make molds out of things more like silicone and urethane type materials and then mold your plastic part in the material that you want. That means it'll be made in a way that it should be or is going to be in production, unless you're 3D printing in production, in which case, you know, this whole topic Has no bearing on your project at all. But if you are trying to replicate that injection molding process, you can use that. They are short run. You make the mold, it lasts 1 to 5, maybe 10 times was the most that I've seen one of these molds survive number of shots, and basically number of parts being put into it before it collapses and can't hold the tolerances of your actual part, meaning you can make something with it, but it won't. is not going to be your actual part. Your dimensions are going to be off, things like that. And so that's a process that I've used in the past in order to get really close or basically identical to injection molding, just using a really cheap tool and tooling instead of using even aluminum tooling. You can obviously use aluminum tooling, it's cheaper than steel tooling, it lasts less. But that still can be a lot of money in order to get— if you're only prototyping one or two parts, you probably want to use something like urethane casting in order to get a part that is in the shape, it has the right, you know, it has all the drafts, it's been made in a similar way to injection molding, and it allows you to have it in the right material. So if you're using material that you can't 3D print, Then this is a good option for prototyping because it allows you to actually use the material that you want to use and will use in your final parts. So especially if you're doing material testing, if you're doing field use and you can't 3D print it, which the library of 3D printable plastics is growing every day, but if you happen to be in that segment where you have it or you've developed a specific plastic mix that is just for your project, if you have a proprietary material. And this is especially the case for biodegradable materials. If you're working in that space and you've created something that hasn't been turned into a 3D printable plastic, because that is a different process to get there, then you want to use something like this. And then there's always, depending on the part that you have made, there's things like vacuum forming and other types of forming and shaping that can be done. In order to mimic a part. So you can even CNC or machine a part out of block of plastic, but it will, will still be a little bit different in terms of physical properties because it hasn't been molded in the same way. And so those are ways to get close, but not all the way. And, and, you know, the closest one is really urethane molding that I've used in the past. It works really well. had some amazing parts come, come out of it and been able to prototype with that and then buy the tooling and know that we had a part that was actually worth doing. So hopefully this gives you a few different ideas and, you know, lets you know that, yeah, we can actually prototype something that's going to be injection molded and be certain and help remove some of that concern. And I've done this with many clients before, remove that concern of Am I going to spend $10,000 on tooling? Is it going to work? How do we know? And so this will help alleviate that. And yeah, it'll cost money, but far less than $10,000 to get it done. So thanks for watching and hope you enjoyed. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed. Don't forget to subscribe and like. Have a good day. Thanks for watching. Hope you, hope you enjoyed this episode. Uh, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, please like and subscribe to our channel. We really appreciate it. Have a good day.