geekhack
geekhack Projects => Making Stuff Together! => Topic started by: Orphan Zombie Children on Sun, 12 April 2015, 20:59:11
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Techshop has a Morgan injection molding machine. I thought it would be fun to try to create some keycaps using it. I don't have any experience with this kind of thing; anyone here know if this machine would be viable for making keycaps with? Any advice or pointing in the right direction would be appreciated!
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It's definately viable, you need to look at mold creation.
Given the high cost of tooling (tens of thousands) for normal injection molding I would suggest you start looking at epoxy-based tools methods. It's probably set you back a couple of hundred dollars in materials which you can use to make the few few molds with.
The difference is that you'll only be able to make a few hundred or a thousand caps before your mold starts to fail verses hundreds of thousands or millions.
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I mean caps from SP and Cherry are injection molded. That's how doubleshot caps are made.
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A simple mold will still set you back at least $5000. At these small numbers it just doesn't make much sense.
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A simple mold will still set you back at least $5000. At these small numbers it just doesn't make much sense.
Well...only if that mold was used in a production machine. This is a machine specifically built for low runs and rapid prototyping (http://www.morganindustriesinc.com/). Probably easier to make the molds. And I'm assuming if it's at a maker space, you'll be able to make the mold and save on costs there.
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The cost of the mold is a valid point that I hadn't given consideration to. After doing some research, it looks like the Morgan press will probably require aluminum molds to be made - albeit that can probably be done in-house at the maker space as well.
It looks like double shot keys require a special injection machine, so that is also not possible with the Morgan press.
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I've been looking at getting into injection moulding.
If you want to do it yourself, I think a good place to start could be learning how to uses CNC router/mill to create the tools for injection moulding.
I'm probably going to go this way once I've done more research... I'll probably also need to learn solidworks...
I have no idea which CNC to get yet tho. There's some cheap ones on ebay but not sure if they could do aluminium.
It looks like it would be a lot of work to a final product but it could be worth it in the long run.
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You only need to CNC molds if you're doing large quantities of injection molded parts. If you're doing lower quantities / prototyping you can make epoxy injection molds.