Project Summary

• This project was part of the Integrated Product Design course on advanced CAD and manufacturing, geared towards learning how to design for the injection molding process and taking it to completion producing parts with a machined mold. I worked in a team of 2 throughout the design, manufacturing, and production.

• We were free to choose an object that could be injection molded and designed both the part and the mold in CAD, minding the design features specific to the injection molding process and manufacturing process of 3-Axis CNC machining for the mold. Besides sizing constraints based on the injection molding machine we had, we also had to keep the machining time under 3 hours for the each mold half.

• We chose to model an airplane which proved challenging with more irregular geometries. We used SolidWorks surface modeling for the part and mold tools to make the mold around it, chacking molding characteristics with draft analysis, and simulations of cooling time, sink, and fill time. Our original design had dihedral wings leading to a non-flat parting line which we couldn’t get to work in SolidWorks after many hours trying multiple methods. Ultimately with a hard deadline closing in we decided to radically redesign the part such that it had a flat parting line and make a new mold from that. We then worked individually on either half of the mold for CAM and machining, where I made the core half with internal ribs (seen left below).

• Finally, we learned to use the injection molding machine and produced 10 final products after many attempts throughout the trial and error process, tweaking parameters like injection time, clamping pressure, injection temperature, and cooling time. An interesting byproduct of our mold design mean that the top of the plane started cooling first while it took some time to remove it from the core, leading to cooling warp pulling the wings up into a dihedral shape like we originally wanted.