Are you planning to acquire injection moulding equipment for your manufacturing plant? Read on and discover some of the ways that you can use to keep the cost of those injection moulded products competitive.

Select the Right Material

Many manufacturing plants incur high injection moulding costs because they selected the highest quality material available for their production runs. You can avoid falling into a similar trap by examining the requirements of your project so that you select the most appropriate (not necessarily the most expensive) material for that application. For instance, why should you use an expensive material like 50% glass filled nylon when ordinary polyethylene would suffice?

Consolidate Processes

Many injection moulded products require secondary processes in order to make the components ready for their users. For instance, you may need to print labels onto the moulded parts before you paint the finished products. Such secondary processes can take time if care isn't taken to have them done in the most cost-effective way. The easiest way to reduce the cost of those secondary processes is to build those steps into the core manufacturing processes of your plant. For instance, you can set up the injection moulding process so that the label can be printed before the component is ejected from the mould. This process consolidation will reduce the time needed to move the component from one workstation to another. The time saved can then be used to mould other products within the same work shift.

Optimise Product Design

You can also keep production costs low by optimizing the design of the mould so that products can be ejected quickly and easily in order to make way for the next shot into the mould. For instance, a mould that relies on a blast of air to eject a component will be faster than another that relies on a rod to push off the product. This is because the mechanical ejection system requires the plastic or any other material to cool to a certain degree before it can be safely knocked off without causing a defect. The air blast is faster because the product can be cooled by the stream of air during the ejection process. Consequently, more products will come off a production line that uses a blast of air to eject finished parts.

You can keep tweaking your systems and processes in order to achieve higher levels of cost-effectiveness. Involve injection-moulding experts during the design of your system so that you get off to a good start that will make your products to have a low unit cost.