Injection molding is regarded by many as the most important method of manufacturing plastic parts, and it’s the method in which Eco Molding specialises.
And if you are considering using the injection molding technique, you might agree that designing a mold for the part is as important as designing the part itself – if the mold is right, the part will be exactly as intended.
Such is the importance of getting the mold correct that both the part and mold are increasingly designed at the same time once the initial product specifications are decided because the mold designer can help inform the development of the final design.
This is why Eco Molding emphasises “design and engineering” prominently in its communications with potential clients.
The company has customers around the world for whom it builds molds and undertakes injection molding projects that often involve rapid prototyping, assembly and shipping.
Computer numerical control, or CNC, machining also forms part of the process.
Established more than 15 years ago, the company mostly builds injection molds from computer-aided design, or CAD, files sent through the internet, but they can also work from prints, drawings and even samples.
Eco Molding’s 2,000 sq m facility is equipped with 20 injection molding machines, ranging from 50 to 650 tins, capable of creating parts ranging in weight from 0.5 grams to 2 kilograms.
It also has a variety of other machines, including CNCs, wire cutters, and printers, as well as metrology and painting machines.
The strongest product categories for Eco Molding are:
- automotive parts, such as door handles and dashboard parts;
- home appliances, such as washing machines and cookers;
- consumer electronics and accessories, such as smartphone cases;
- industrial machine parts and fixtures for facilities;
- parts for original equipment manufacturing applications; and
- optics, such as contact lenses and cases.
A large proportion of Eco Mold’s 100 employees are designers and engineers, and its production capacity is around 50 injection molds a month.
The company has gained the ISO9001 quality assurance certificate.
Eco Molding also emphasises its transparency with respect to its pricing and its goal is to always provide the lowest quotation possible for any job.
The company tends not to use brokers to reduce the cost to the customer. “Most traders can’t quote at our pricing level,” says the company. “Our prices are lower because we build the molds directly for our customers.”
Another reason why the company prefers to deal with customers directly is that, whereas a broker might have minimal contact with the customer and mostly send them to the mold maker, Eco Mold’s own sales managers would manage the project from beginning to end.
“This is to make sure our high level of service is maintained through the whole process and the communication is most efficient,” says Eco Mold.
Injection molding can be expensive because the molds themselves have traditionally been made from hardened steel, pre-hardened steel, aluminum, and/or beryllium-copper alloy.
These traditional materials tend to be preferred for parts that need to be mass manufactured, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
However, modern aluminium molds can be a cost-effective alternative, with higher-grade so-called “aircraft aluminium” providing the added advantage of being more amenable to machining with today’s computerized processes.
Aluminium can be more cost-effective for production runs up to a few hundred thousand.
Eco Mold says its particular advantage is in the low-volume market, which means about 1,000 to 50,000 pieces.
In addition to creating the mould, Eco Mould says it can produce prints, paint parts and assemble in-house and then manage the logistics and supply chain to anywhere in the world.
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