What is Injection Moulding?

Injection moulding is a manufacturing process commonly used for mouldings more detailed plastic components. Both surfaces can have basic or intricate details and the parts can be used for either aesthetic or non-visual uses. Essentially, most of the plastic parts we use today have been injection moulded. It is a fairly quick moulding process which can create a large amount of identical plastic parts, the flexibility that also comes with injection moulding is the allowance for extensive design boundaries.

How Does Injection Moulding Work?

There are 3 parts to our injection machine – the feed hopper, the screw and the heated barrel. Plastic granules are inserted into the heated barrel by a hopper, the plastic that is placed in the hopper is usually in granular form although not always. This material is then heated and melted using friction from a reciprocating screw along with heater bands. The molten plastic is then injected into a mold cavity. Whilst the material cools it solidifies and hardens in the configuration of the mold. This is then removed using ejector pins.

Advantages of Injection Moulding

The main advantage of injection moulding is the ability to mass produce. Once the initial costs have been paid, the price per unit during injection moulding is very low. This price also tends to drop as more parts are produced.

Another advantage of injection moulding is the low scrap rates compared to relative traditional manufacturing processes like CNC machining which cuts away at substantial percentages of original plastic block or sheet.

Injection moulding is also very repeatable, the 1000th part you produce is going to be identical to the first one. This is ideal when trying to produce brand consistency and part reliability in high volume production.

Here are some of our capabilities within injection moulding:

• Low to medium batch runs 100’s-100,000’s

• In-House Tooling

• Machine from 30-320 tonnes

• Up to 800g shot weight

Injection moulding at Protomould is a great service for finished production on a small to medium volume scale. It is also useful for finalised prototypes that are used for consumer or product testing. We pride ourselves in fastidious quality and excellent customer service – delivering bespoke design, rapid prototyping, solutions to technical issues and a service that can always be relied upon.

For more information on Injection moulding or any of our other services, please feel free to explore the rest of our website or call us on 01964 544 544.

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