"Cost of plastic injection mold?" Topic

I am curious how much would it cost to make a plastic injection mold for a mini? For example PSC 15mm tank srue.

It used to be tens of thousands of dollars.

I suspect the price may have dropped considerably now, but is still rather high.

I am buyer working for a company that uses injection moulding – tooling can be anywhere from £5,000.00 GBP up to £22,000.00 GBP

I should think you would be looking at around 10k average – the plastic moulding cost thereafter would minimal.

I know of tool makers in the UK used to making tooling for injection moulding that can compete with Chinese quotes through efficient/lean & intelligent manufacturing techniques to a superior quality than Chinese tools.

I've seen websites for Chinese companies that do this on the cheap (relatively speaking) by CNC milling the molds. I imagine you get what you pay for, though.

Doug

Yes you you mill the metal tooling to create the moulding detail across the two halves of the metal tooling. There is no other efficient/accurate way of doing it currently though metal laser sintering holds a lot of potential over the next decade or two.

You can also use composite tooling which is safe up to 3000 shots plus. But may degrade soon thereafter.

I think I read somewhere (probably here), that Chines companies could do it for as little as $5,000 USD, or so.

I suspect that'll depend upon the complexity of what you want done as well.

Rhysius Cambrensis

How many shots are the high quality metal tools good for? Out of interest what metal are they made from? When companies talk of making adjustments to the tooling I can understand more material being removed but can it be added back to a tool? I'm guessing not but again am interested to know what the altering a tool stage might involve.

and a cooling plate as well.. (that's currently a 5-10K pound expense)

UK tool makers & injection moulders, if worth their salt will offer lifetime guarentee of their metal tools. The mould are made from two types of steel. A decent tool steel and then for the working/moving parts of the tool, a high grade steel.

This means a steel tool will have a long lifetime and so long as they are looked after and refurbished can be good for over 100,000 easily.

A tool I orderd recently, at £9,200.00 GBP included the first thousand shots free of charge comes with a lifetime guarentee and will be maintained by the moulded who has in house tooling facilities and experienced tool makers employed to offer a complete turn key solution.

All we did is provide CAD models of the actual part we want moulded – no tooling designs. They designed and produced the tooling based solely on this information. This a new supplier I sourced and have since attended their site to ensure they are capable and competent and are of a standard acceptable to precision moulding.

Beware of Chinese tooling, they tend to be over sized, they make the whole tool from low grade tool steel, charge for maintenance and refurbishment as well as storage and to recover the tool and import it to the UK can be very expensive. Within Europe, tooling should be made to a universal standard which means it can be plugged into any plastic injection machine if they have the relevant accreditation and working practices. This is not the case with Chinese tooling.

Always make sure when ordering tooling you have written agreements ensuring you own the tooling and it is not a shared cost/ownership – this can happen even if you pay for tooling.

There is the composite option for tooling but degrades after 3-4000 shots. However, it is half the cost.

I attended the advanced engineering show at the Birmingham NEC on Wednesday – some really fascinating stuff there as I am Technical Composites Buyer

I hope this helps.

With regards to adjustment with plastic injection moulding tools, yes it's easy skim off the profile cavities but difficult to add on to.

I talked to a UK based injection moulding company a few years ago to get an idea of cost. They quoted about £20.00 GBPk for a complete tool of a die and frame. IIRC the frame held the die in the machine, had channels for the plastic to flow into the die, cooling, and holes for the pins that ejected the finished moulding. You could design the frame to work with a number of different dies, saving money, but you couldn't have a fully generic one. The composite dies were £8.00 GBP-12 and the frame £10.00 GBPk. Each shot was 30p. They said about 5000 shots was the limit for composite. The cost of a steel die was "many more tens of thousands of pounds, but will last forever" to paraphrase what they said.

This didn't include a the master model (the 3 times original), but did include design of the die and frame. They used CNC for much of the work (after laser scanning the 3 time original) and then finished by hand using a pantograph to give fine detail. They were a bit dismissive of fully CNC made dies for anything that required detail.

You need to be able to sell a large quantity to make it worth while. The composite dies are quite cost efficient unless it is popular. Then the replacement costs quickly mean that a steel die would have been cheaper, if only you had known from the start.

I believe that PSC now use aluminium tooling rather than steel. That makes it cheaper ( for a loss in figure definition) … you can certainly tell the difference the the latest figures (The Great War) , to earlier sets. Makes it more 'army men' than wargames figure (of course IMHO).

All interesting, thank you.

There is a Gent at Lincoln Hackspace that has a Injection Molder ( industrial one that cost around 2k second hand ) , he does his own molds in aluminium using a CNC machine.

Could ask him if he could do you a mold & he does some molding work on side.

LNS Technologies ( techkits.com ) do a hand injection unit & a maker made his own mold ( for casting fish shapes ) using a Aluminium frame & the detail out of a special industrial epoxy.

Regards

MMG.

@Rhysius

Thanks for the information – very interesting

I saw a reference one in a 1/72 review about multi-part molds – any idea how that would work

I confess I'm not going to be doing this stuff, I'm an engineer so I always want to know how things work …

John