Which manufacturing method is good for plastic products?

The main question which comes in every product \ industrial designer's mind is which should be the best manufacturing method to follow while producing plastic parts. there are some simple things which must be considered before deciding on what process shall be used to keep the cost low as well as to have a good finished product.

The first and most important point to consider is How many parts do I actually need?

Once this question is answered, it makes something clear like by answering this the designer knows that the production falls in low volume production or large volume production. if we talk numerically anything falling in between 1-20,000 pieces can be considered as low volume production.

Now once this thing is clear we can move onto next step, if the production is high volume in such cases usually in plastics the best method which is used widely is injection moulding. But there is nothing new in this most people already know this.

The important decisions to take comes up when the number of parts someone needs falls in low volume category, for that then we must look into a number of different methods used which are summarized below.

Rapid Injection moulding this is usually used when we need quantities in thousands and we also need very good finish, but conventional injection moulding cost will be too much to be justified, in such cases RIM comes into action, here due to aluminum moulds the tooling cost is much reduced.

3D Printed Injection Moulding if the number of pieces we need are in hundreds and we can compromise on finish a little in such cases 3d printed injection moulding is a good and less costly choice as in this the tooling cost is almost negligible as the mould is prepared using SLA 3d printing technologies. Each mould can be used to produce pieces in double figures.

Polyurethane casting this is another very interesting low volume production method which can give a good finish too, but dimensional accuracy is a little hard to control and good thing about polyurethanes is that we can achieve almost any properties we want.

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