3 side affect the right price for mold

In many cases asking mold makers to bid on a new mold is like going to a home builder and stating that you want a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with a 2 1/2 car garage and wanting the price. There is way too much information missing. Many home builders simply will not supply a quote until they have a design to look at. Give 5 shops the same part print and 3D part file and all 5 many see this mold entirely differently depending upon how the RFQ was written. The best way to get an accurate quote is with a complete list of specifications and a preliminary design or sketch. The clearer the information that more accurate the quotes. Which side will affect its price?

Materials can be a big cost driver. There are typically two types of mold suppliers. One supplier focuses only on having the lower possible price. These mold makers typically cut every corner they can to be able to provide the lowest cost. This can mean buying the lowest priced steel they can find. They will purchase the cheapest grades of carbon for making electrodes. They will make the mold base as small as possible to save $50 to $100 on steel. This could easily mean a mold base that will flex and move under injection pressure. The other type of mold supplier is one who is focused on quality. They tend to purchase the best grades of steel, install better quality components and design molds that are more robust.

The other big cost driver is quality. Let's take the mold base for instance. You can purchase a pre-made mold from many sources. You can buy an A style or a B style mold base. The A style mold base might be easier for the mold maker to machine but the strength of the mold base might be greatly diminished. We build all of our mold bases from scratch. We purchase the best quality pre-hardened tool steel plates, do all of the rough machining, drill all of the waterlines before we do any of the finished machining of mold base pockets, parting line lock pockets and leader pin and bushing holes. This is the only way the mold base can be exact. The mold base is the foundation and if you don't have a good foundation your mold is not going to perform well or last the life of the program.

One last thing to point out is what is the current economic conditions and size of the mold supplier. Smaller shops tend to be lower priced but they lack the depth to offer quicker deliveries and if there is a mistake or a change they can't always react as quickly. Smaller shops also in some cases don't have the level of engineering support in-house, which means they will cut corners getting the mold design done for less. When the economy is soft smaller shops tend to cut prices just to keep their valuable employees working. There is a big risk to have a small shop loaded with low margin work only to find out the company owner is closing his doors because his company has failed. I have seen when I requested 10 suppliers in China to bid on a new mold project and the prices ranged over 300% from low to high. The lowest price was what I had estimated it would take just for materials. Obviously I knew that was a blown quote and I could not afford to buy such a cheap tool.

WIT MOLD, a plastic injection mould manufacturer in China, provide high quality and affordable price custom injection moldfor every customer who really need.