Molding services for Agricultural customersArguments abound touting the benefits of in-house mold tooling capabilities. But does the reality live up to the hype?
The short answer: Not necessarily..
1. THE TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT
The longer answer is that, while many shops claim their in-house mold tooling can reduce your time to market, help you avoid downtime for repairs and modifications, and cut your overall manufacturing costs, the reality isn’t always so clear-cut.
That’s because, for many injection mold tooling shops, adding injection molding can actually increase overhead costs. Sometimes, these costs trickle down to the customer.
Injection mold tooling and injection molding together can actually raise costs in some instances. This happens when injection mold toolers take on injection molding as an afterthought. That means higher overhead for injection mold tooling and manufacturing shops in the form of additional equipment and labor costs that are passed on to the customers.
2. INJECTION MOLD MAINTENANCE AS A STANDARD, NOT AN EXCEPTION
Any injection molding manufacturer that’s worth its salt should have adequate tool management and modification capabilities on-site. Here at KASO, for example, we have a strict injection mold tool maintenance program that includes stripping, cleaning, preventative maintenance plus a full mold inspection to ensure normal wear and tear don’t negatively affect our customers’ molds. We also maintain relationships with a variety of reputable tooling shops so we can provide our customers with a mold that is the right fit for their needs. Our customers get to choose based on what they need, not what’s most convenient for us as their manufacturing partner.
Learn more about injection mold maintenance at KASO Plastics.
3. VARIETY REALLY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE (WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR MOLD TOOLING RESOURCES)
It also means that when it comes to your injection mold tooling (the most cost-intensive aspect of new manufacturing projects), with some injection molders, what you see is what you get. One tool shop, one set of capabilities. Companies like KASO, on the other hand, have spent years (50+ years in our case!) building relationships with a wide selection of injection mold manufacturers, so we can pair you with the injection mold tool manufacturer whose capabilities most closely align with your needs.
Time to market can be affected by many things. For an experienced injection molder with robust engineering capabilities, time to market reductions come by way of Early Supplier Involvement, rapid prototyping and 3D printing using FDM printing. Our customers get the opportunity to test out design concepts with prototyped parts that boast 80% of the strength of a normal injection molded component, so you can create working samples that shorten the road from design to manufacturing via an iterative process that allows changes to happen quickly without expensive retooling.
Have questions about injection mold tooling? Talk with an experienced KASO engineer today to learn more about tool design, rapid prototyping support, and preparing for manufacturing, and let us take the worry out of your next injection molding project.