If you have ever wondered what is involved in injection molding or just wondered what exactly injection molding was we’ve created a video giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how this daily process in our manufacturing plant gives our partners quality plastic parts.

Injection molding is a pretty unique process we use to create quality custom plastic parts. In this video Brett will show you the process and explain the financial benefits it can bring to your business.

Hello everybody, Brett Pennefeather, President of ECK Plastic Arts. I just wanted to take a quick minute and explain what injection molding is. There are a lot of different ways to get your plastic parts made; ECK Plastic actually does quite a few. But injection molding is something that’s pretty unique in itself. I figured I’d do a quick tutorial on what it is when you’re trying to figure out how to get your parts made.

So, injection molding is taking resin—little granular pellets like this—and using pressure and heat to inject them into a mold and making a net shape. Okay, part comes out, it’s done.

Now, how do we do that?

So all plastic needs to be dried. There’s moisture content in the keyboard you’re touching right now, the phone you’re touching, all the plastic components have moisture in them. We have to get it out. If we bring the temperatures up, it’s going to off-gas and make brittle parts. You don’t want that.

So, in injection molding, we dry the material, and the material gets conveyed directly from the dryer into the feed throat of the machine—in other words, where the resin drops in. The feed throat is the little thing there that says “Matt Stewie.” That plastic drops down into the barrel of the machine

The barrel is essentially just a hydraulic cylinder with a screw or an auger on the inside, that’s constantly turning, constantly grinding, and plasticizing—which means bringing it to a semi-liquid state and pushing it forward in that barrel. Okay.

From there, it actually forces the plastic in, and it travels into the mold.

So, the mold—this right here is a full-frame production mold. Every 20 seconds, we drop two of these.

Plastic travels in right here through what’s called the sprue, which is this part right here. It comes in from the feed throat, travels down this along the runners (to get the parts out of the way), along the runners up into the gates, and into the cavities of the part.

Then it would end up sticking to this side, and they get ejected out and drop—fall right down. At that point, we just have net parts coming out.

Now, the reason why that’s relative is because molds—people often get sticker shock. Molds can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 depending on what you’re making, cavitation, all these different things.

But if you get a part every 20 seconds, that means your piece price is going to be significantly less expensive. So that mold is going to pay for itself very, very quickly, if you’re going to process it by machining or other ways of making those parts.

So, at Eck Plastic Arts, one thing that we’re very good about doing is we actually take a look at your project with the finance end and say, “Okay, how do we want to build this mold to keep the cost down as much as possible, but yet also keep the piece price where it needs to be?” So your entire project cost is absolutely as cost-effective for you as we can make it.