Making My Own Keycaps with Injection Moulding

[Orphan Zombie Children]

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!

[__red__]

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.

[CPTBadAss]

I mean caps from SP and Cherry are injection molded. That's how doubleshot caps are made.

[JaccoW]

A simple mold will still set you back at least $5000. At these small numbers it just doesn't make much sense.

[CPTBadAss]

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. 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.

[Orphan Zombie Children]

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.

[Frogbot]

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.

[__red__]

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.