Notes

Which is the Right Choice?
When moving from style to producing your parts, you must decide how to make the parts. It the best case, you had actually currently considered this during the design procedure and your style is currently enhanced for among the procedures. Bear in mind, throughout the development life cycle; the right option might really alter. Two typical techniques are CNC machining and injection molding. Both of these have advantages and drawbacks when selecting between them.First let's take a look at each procedure.

CNC Machining:
A procedure that usually starts with a block of the desired material, CNC machining involves exactly removing material layers at a time. This procedure permits many different products to be used with few restrictions. Likewise, since it is computer system managed, extremely exact tolerances can be attained.

Injection molding:
As the name recommends, this procedure involves injecting product into a mold. This is done by melting the stock product and requiring it into mold at high pressure. The part is then permitted to cool in the mold and after that is ejected from the mold. The procedure is duplicated for the next part.

Which procedure is right for you?
In general, this can be looked at as a trade off between multiple of various qualities; speed, volume, product, tolerances/surface finish, and style. Each on of these can be a gating facture in using one process vs. the other and may even need modifications to the part in order to make.

Speed:
This is the simplest. For low volume of parts, CNC machining is the fastest. If you require 10 parts in 2 weeks, CNC machining is probably your only option. If you require 50,000 parts in 4 months, injection molding is the method to go. Injection molding requires time to make the mold and guarantee the parts remain in tolerance. This can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. When this is done, producing parts using the mold is an extremely quick procedure. The up front time investment of injection molding will settle at high volumes.

Volume:
Let's take a look at this independent of time. Rather, the main focus here is price per part. Which is more affordable changes depending on volume. CNC is more affordable when you need a few parts approximately a couple of hundred. While you do get some benefit of volume in the cost, it is normally seen between a couple of parts and a hundred. At larger volumes, you do not get any additional benefit of volume. This is from distributing the setup expense over the number of parts made.

The actual cost per part of injection molded parts is substantially more affordable that machined parts. Sadly, for injection molding, the creating the mold can be a large upfront expense. This is than expanded throughout the variety of parts made to figure out the cost per part. At a specific volume, even with the large in advance cost of the molds, injected parts end up being cheaper than machined. As more parts are produced, the gap in cost ends up being greater. This crossover can take place from as little as 100 parts as much as about 5000.

Material:
CNC machining provides a higher selection of products that can be used to develop the parts. This can be extremely essential deciding factor if a high performance plastic or a specific plastic is required. In general, harder plastics are simpler to machine than softer products. For injected molded elements, the product choice can be more limited. Increasingly more high performing materials are being produced with injection molding in mind.

Tolerance/ Surface Finish:
Once again, the advantage goes to CNC machining. With many products, a tighter tolerance can be held and a much better surface area finish can be obtained. One advantage of injection molding is the repeatability from lot to lot. Molds can last for millions of parts with very little wear. This permits the parts from one batch to the next to be nearly similar. With CNC machining, each part is put on the machine to be produced and more variability will be seen.

Style:
First concern should be; is the design going to alter? If so, then you might not wish to invest the money to make a mold yet. Molds are challenging and sometimes difficult to customize for modifications in style.

But even before that, developing a part for machining can be much different than for molding. In both cases, one process is able to make functions that would be tough or impossible to create using the other process.

Machining allows for fantastic versatility in the design. Lots of features can be quickly made with machining that would be extremely challenging or cost forbade in molding. A few of these consist of, overhangs, large walls with no drafts and variable wall densities.

On the other hand, injection molding allows for deep features, square holes and living hinges to be produced quickly that could be challenging and costly with machining.

As you can see, the choice in between machining vs. injection molding is not straightforward. If you require some of the advantages of both from tolerances, cost and design features, you might want to think about a two step operation where the main features of the part is injection molded and secondary machining options are done to carry out the final actions. This is common method to mix the benefits of the two processes together.
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