Plastic Injection Molding Injection Mold Making the Manufacturin

The Plastic injection molding process

Plastic injection molding is widely used today for both consumer products and engineering applications. Almost every plastic item around you was manufactured using injection molding. This is because the technology can produce identical parts at very high volumes (typically, 1,000 to 100,000+ units) at a very low cost per part (typically, at $1-5 per unit).

But compared to other technologies, the start-up costs of injection molding are relatively high, mainly because custom tooling is needed. A mold can cost anywhere between $3,000 and $100,000+, depending on its complexity, material (aluminum or steel) and accuracy (prototype, pilot-run or full-scale production mold).

Manufacturing the injection mold

The mold is like the negative of a photograph: its geometry and surface texture is directly transferred onto the injection molded part. 

It usually makes up the largest portion of the start-up costs in Plastic injection molding: the cost of a typical mold starts at approximately $2,000-5,000 for a simple geometry and relatively small production runs (1,000 to 10,000 units) and can go upwards to $100,000 for molds optimized for full-scale production (100,000 units or more). 

This is due to the high level of expertise required to Plastic mold design and manufacture a high-quality mold that can produce accurately thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of parts.