Mold Plate

This mold plate design was the final project for the intro to CNC Mill machining course at Pasadena City College.

We were challenged to create a mold plate design for the mini hand-crank injection molding machine based on a set number of available tools.

Above is the drawing sheet provided to the class listing the tools available for use and the stock dimensions. The other criteria provided was that the injection mold can only pump about 1-cubic inch of material so the total cavity volume would be limited to that.

The biggest challenge was that all the G-Code had to be hand written – no usage of any programs to autogenerate toolpaths.

From that point we were set free to come up with our own designs. Knowing I wanted to keep it relatively simple making use of mostly G01 and G02 operations I looked around hoping some inspiration would strike. Ironically it did – looking at the HAAS logo of the milling machine I figured it would make a fun little plastic medallion.

Modeling the plate in SolidWorks I then make a drawing indicating all the start and end points I would need to know for each individual move of the tool.

I wrote the code in excel spreadsheet so I could easily deal with autonumbering of N-lines. Then ran it through NCSIMUL to check that there were no errors that would cause the machine to crash into the stock or vice.

Once everything was complete, moved on to the physical dry run on the machine, ran the first mold plate and started the whole process over again for the mirrored counter part.

The final step before getting to fill the plates and make the plastic parts is pressing in the alignment pins. Once that is complete we slightly heated the molds and went to town mixing plastic beads and seeing how well our designs came out.