4 factors that determine your injection mold costs
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In our company I teach our mold Engineers, quoting engineers and project managers that injection molding costs depend on 4 main factors:
Mold Life: Mold life time is determined by your product life time and thus total order quantities during this life time. Mold life effects mainly the tooling cost. Prototype molds use regular steels such like P20 or 718H. For production molds at higher volume, hardened steel would be required, like NAK 80 or H13. Part Complexity: Complexity plays a vital role in injection molding costs, which adding extra works to mold making , cnc machining, edm, and more steps during molding manufacturing. Tolerance requirements, fine detailing or the number of undercuts are the main reasons. To re-design your part as a simplified version is the best solution to lower your molding cost. Molding Materials: The plastic molding material you selected will effect both tooling cost and piece pricing, which varies from different types of materials. Surface Finish: Less important in the total mold cost is your choice of the of your part’s finishing: Mirror polishing adds cost to injection molding, which requires hardened steels (NAK 80 Steel) to create the molds, and cleaner injection molding condition. Also, a higher texturing requirement is another reason to cost increasing. |
