TIM Talks - Part Warpage

Welcome to Texas Injection Molding TIM Talk, where we talk shop about problems that we encounter and how we solve them. Today we're going to talk about an issue that we had with a part that had both thick and thin sections causing it to warp, and we're trying to get out the warp. How did we solve that problem? There are a couple ways. On this particular instance, it was an existing part, and we were making bad parts in production due to warpage. One of the first things we questioned was at what point during the process was the gate frozen? If the gate isn't frozen, then the part is not going to be consistent, so you have no control over that warpage. The step one is to make sure the gate is frozen so we can at least control it. So, we got to digging into it and we understood that the pack time was not sufficient. They turned off the pack time before the gate was frozen, so that was allowing material to enter and exit that gate at times in which we weren't aware. The part size and weight were inconsistent. We did our gate seal study and once that was done and the gate was frozen, we had to increase the pack time from eight seconds to 12 seconds. The gate was frozen, and now we can control the warpage, and that fixed the problem. It goes back to process development. We've got to do that right the first time or else we're going to find issues like that in production. #injectionmolding #injectionmoldingprocess #plasticmolding #plasticsindustry #manufacturing