Injection Moulding ?

karltimber

Hi,

I have a small plastic item which I would like to get manufatcured.
It will be something similar in size to a pen in solid plastic.

How do I go about this. I have a protype/physical item already.
Do I contact some companies to price such a job with ref to qty, die cost etc.
Is there a initial outlay for the tooling and then production or what way do companies usually price these jobs.

It will be for an initial possibly 30k pieces, so I am not looking at small quantities.

Any other tips would be great.
thanks
K

DublinDilbert

karltimber wrote: »

Hi,

I have a small plastic item which I would like to get manufatcured.
It will be something similar in size to a pen in solid plastic.

How do I go about this. I have a protype/physical item already.
Do I contact some companies to price such a job with ref to qty, die cost etc.
Is there a initial outlay for the tooling and then production or what way do companies usually price these jobs.

It will be for an initial possibly 30k pieces, so I am not looking at small quantities.

Any other tips would be great.
thanks
K

Normally you need a 3D model of the part to start with... is this what your prototype got made from?

Are the dimensions critical?

Do you have a material picked out? ( is this critical )

You'll need to contact some moulding companies, some making the tooling in house, others farm it out... Your 30K volume, is that per year? Although we would think of that as high, in moulding / plastics it would be quite low....

karltimber

hi,

dimensions would not be very vritical -within 0.5mm possibly

not sure of the material type, but then again not critical.

30k - 50k per year me thinks - could be more.

I know this is vague but want to get a basic feel forwhat the costs are compared to importing the item.

K

carveone

karltimber wrote: »

Hi,

I have a small plastic item which I would like to get manufatcured.
It will be something similar in size to a pen in solid plastic.

Generally the way it works is you pay upfront for the injection mold and then you pay per unit for a minimum number of units (normally 10k is the min).

The mold is the expensive bit and is highly variable. You could be looking from $1000 or $2000 to anything... The parts themselves are rather cheap these days...

Do I contact some companies to price such a job with ref to qty, die cost etc.

Absolutely - the cost is way variable. These days even small companies deal with Chinese manufacturing facilities through a middle man who speaks the lingo and knows how to deal with all the crap. Chinese business is way too scary for even the seasoned westerner to just saunter in there on his own (there was a series about this on RTE at some point).
My guess is that if you source to an Irish company they'll just re-source to China, no offense to Irish manufacturers (if there are any left).

XPI is a company that deals with this type of thing (www.xpointchina.com/). Can't hurt to drop them an email - keep it simple . There are bazillions of companies doing this...

Good luck!

carveone

Actually, as an aside, people are gernally quite surprised how cheaply custom parts are these days. I was talking to a guy (friend of a friend, the usual) who was making an electronic unit of some description and was unhappy about the LCD display - he simply assumed that using off the shelf parts would be easier and cheaper but had problems with the lack of flexibility the standard alphanumeric display gave him. For example he wanted [On/Off] as a little icon or symbol instead of the text.

After some investigation he found out that he could get fully custom displays made (in China too I think) and it was _less_ expensive (for his 100k parts of course!) as his pcbs and firmware were simplified... Interesting huh...

MrPreachan

Do you have a 3d, or 2d sketch of the part, if so pm me wit your contact details, and if possible attach the drawing, I'm not in the tooling business anymore but can put you on the right path, and give you a rough indication of cost etc for the mould.

Bluefoam

There was a guy in Kinselley who specialised in small run injection moulding. Very nice guy and his operation was quite sophisticated. I think his name was Ken & the company was Custom Components...

Bluefoam

http://www.c-c.ie/

He will probably be able to knock up the 3d drawing too, he uses 'inventor' for drawing.