Mold Craft Tool Showcased Sodick Plustech’s New Micro Molding Machine
A 4-cavity mold for very small PEEK parts—a pipette “funnel tip” component for a medical customer—ran in the new Sodick Plustech LP20EH2 Micro Molding series with a 12-mm diameter plunger.
Although Mold Craft is typically known for their ability to design and build high cavitation production molds to produce parts that number in the hundreds of millions, Mold Craft has also received recognition for the ability to mold extremely tight tolerances on micro parts with intricate geometry that require high Cpk values. This challenge was just that, micro parts shaped like a funnel or pipette with extreme length to wall thickness ratio. To add to this complexity, the customer needed to use PEEK due to its high strength characteristics.
Mold Craft Inc. (booth 1295) will showcase a 4-cavity mold for very small PEEK parts at NPE2012. The pipette “funnel tip” component for a medical customer of Mold Craft’s will run in the new Sodick Plustech LP20EH2 Micro Molding series with a 12-mm diameter plunger. Sodick’s booth is #363.
The funnel tip, which was molded of PEEK, has a minimum thin wall section of 0.008 inch. Designed and built by Mold Craft, the tool incorporates the patented MeltFilpper technology from Beaumont Technologies. The part is .472 inches long by .054 inch at the top of the funnel tip.
According to Jim Liddell, New Business Development Manager for Mold Craft, the mold started out as a single-cavity tool designed in a larger mold base to accommodate expansion. “To prove out the design, Sodick ran the mold and it worked well, so due to demand we expanded the mold to four cavities,” he states. “Eventually, the mold could be an 8-cavity tool, dependent on customer production demand.”
Mold Craft worked with Beaumont Technologies to verify the mold design using Beaumont’s proprietary VeriFlo mold-filling analysis software. Melt Flipper was used in the mold because there was concern about the material flow and being able to fill the cavities evenly using PEEK material. “The mold-filling analysis revealed a number of negative effects from shear,” notes Liddell. “The MeltFlipper technology eliminated those concerns.”
A mold manufacturer that typically specializes in high-cavitation production molds for the medical disposable, medical device, and consumer product markets, Mold Craft also creates MIM molds for a variety of industries. Come to NPE to see this mold in production at booth 363 and 1295.
