What are the advantages of injection molding?

1. Efficient high production

Once you have developed the molds, the process is extremely fast with cycle times as short as 10 seconds. It is excellent for medium and high-volume production runs for anything from 10,000 parts to well over 100,000 depending on what molds you use.

Sometimes you can increase production by using a multi cavity or family mold, where several parts are produced from one press to further increase the manufacturing rate.

If you are outsourcing your molding then it’s also important to consider an efficient front-end design and order process – take a look at our on demand manufacturing.

2. Low cost per part

For high output production runs the cost per part is very low. Even for medium volumes – in the range of 10,000 to 25,000 parts, you can keep the costs down by using aluminum molds instead of steel.

3. Repeatability

You can manufacturer identical products over and over again. This is ideal when you need to have parts with high tolerances and reliability across high volumes.

4. Large material choice

There is a huge range of plastic materials that you can select from depending on what properties you need from your final part. And you are not limited to plastic, Protolabs also offers liquid silicone rubber molding.

You can even use fillers in the molding material, which adds greater strength to the completed part, and you have a huge range of colors to choose from as well.  Talk to us about what you need your part to achieve – there are generally a number of different options.

5. Low waste

The injection molding process produces very little waste when compared to many other manufacturing processes. Even if there is any unused or waste plastic, you can recycle it for future use.

6. High detail

The process involves injecting molten plastic into the mold under very high pressure. This presses the plastic hard up against the molds allowing complex and intricate shapes plus a lot of detail.

7. Little or no post processing

Generally, you will need very little post production as the parts usually have good aesthetics post production. We can produce the tooling with a special finish which will show immediately on the Injection Molding Products.  You can even have your logo or text engraved on it.