Design for manufacturability is also known as design for manufacturing or DFM in short.
In the industry of plastic injection molding. DFM is more often like”design for moldability“, as mold makers focus on the feasibility of injection molding process. At Plastopia, we make a report (normally in PPT) on DFM to show customers how to optimize part design, our molding solution and potentially problematic areas of your plastic parts.
Sometimes you may rush to publish your unique design to the market, hoping to skip some steps to make the tooling fast as possible.
However, DFM is not the step that is worthy of skipping.
Reduce Tooling Rework
Avoid Molding Mistakes
Reduce Production Cost
With a simple part design as an example, you will get to know what our DFM report can help you…
General information is an overview of the data of your part design and the coming mold. It helps you and the mold maker to double all the data.
Mold Layout shows how the runners will be laid. If you have a tooling engineer, he can double check if the layout is right for your mold.
The gate in the report is not your only option. You can let us know if it effects cosmetics or functionality. In this design, it is SUB GATE.
Most parting lines are usually located on the edges of the molded parts, which looks like “invisible”. However, some lines may be obvious, which locate in or around the middle of the part.
You can you send us your design with draft added (like the sample design), or we can do this job for you.
Thanks to advanced software, we can analyze what drafts are necessary very fast.
We do thickness analysis for your part. If the wall thickness is not uniform, you will have to to re-design the part to eliminate the issue of sink marks, or you can accept the issue if sink marks do not affect cosmetics.
Lifters or Slides are areas of the plastic injection molds that is used for creating undercuts. There are split lines left after movement of lifers or slides.
If these lines are not accepted, you will have to re-design the part to remove undercuts.
Marks left by ejector pins, which are long pins used in the injection molds to push the final molded product out of the mold.
The marks can not be removed due to the process of injection molding.
Surface of texture or polish should be decided before machining the molds. It is not recommended to change them after the mold is created, which might be too late, as the draft may not machined again as specified texture.
After submitting the form below, one of our Customer Service Engineers will reach out to provide you with a free design for manufacturability of your part. Our standard follow-up time is within one business day.