INJECTION MOLD DESIGN & Engineering
Injection mold engineering is the foundational effort behind many products that populate our shelves today. Transforming an initial idea into a real-world functional mold capable of high-volume production runs demands experience and understanding. Reliant fields a diverse and knowledgeable team that puts fast and effective injection mold design and engineering within easy reach. From initial concept to final approval, there are many steps in between—and many complex processes that combine to produce exceptional outcomes. Reliant can scale to meet your needs at any level and provides full-service support at every stage of the process.
Kick-start the plastic injection mold design effort for your next project with our help. See what we can achieve together with our diverse service menu.
Product Development
Quality products stem from good plastic mold design. Reliant collaborates with clients on sustainable product development, and our team of experienced engineering staff members works with the latest technology to develop quality plastic parts.
We will assist you with new product development by working concurrently and in close coordination with your staff of engineers during the design phase of your project.
Designing for reliable manufacturability at the beginning of the project helps us ensure that every project results in good parts produced from durable mold designs.
Our design and engineering group streamlines the product development process.
Our plastic product development process centers on helping you achieve cost savings and weight reductions. We design parts using plastic injection molding technology to replace components made from sheet metal, castings, stampings and machined materials. Reliant uses SolidWorks 2018 and AutoCAD to create highly accurate 3D models and 2D drawings for your project. We then utilize mold flow analysis software to simulate the injection molding process. This step lets us predict manufacturing issues, so we may adjust your design for maximum reliability in the factory.
Share your ideas for product development with our team to discover what’s possible.
Concurrent Engineering
Concurrent engineering involves multiple teams working on different project phases all at once. Ultimately, combining these efforts leads to faster injection mold engineering and a shorter turnaround time for manufacturing. Our experienced engineering staff is ready to collaborate with your engineers to develop products and concurrently solve issues in the preproduction stage.
Our engineers’ extensive product design and manufacturing expertise will find the best solutions to meet your design criteria. We work with you in the design and prototype stages to provide value-added input assisting in all aspects from part design to shipping considerations.
An injection molding engineer from our team can also work with you to redesign or modify existing parts to reduce your production costs by analyzing material selection, exploring weight reduction strategies, streamlining the production process and redesigning packaging. Our engineering department has extensive experience designing custom secondary fixtures from CNC to final assembly and can reverse-engineer any part or product.
Learn how our team can be an asset to your business when speed and reliability are the order of the day
In-House Tool Repair Facility
Wear and tear are always concerns in plastic injection mold design. Even the most well-designed molds can encounter problems in production. Damaged tooling can mean expensive downtime that impacts your project timetables—something we aim to help you avoid with our broad capabilities to carry out plastic mold maintenance.
We offer complete and full-service plastic mold design, maintenance and repair in a 5,000-square-foot, temperature-controlled, on-site tool room. If a mold requires attention, our staff is ready within minutes to make the necessary repairs efficiently, thus quickly reducing or eliminating production downtime.
The Reliant tool room is fully equipped with lathes, mills, surface grinders and all the machinery needed to maintain all types of molds. Our preventive maintenance and repair program for the molds keeps them in top shape throughout their lives, allowing them to achieve their guaranteed life spans—most well over one million cycles.
Find out how our plastic injection mold repair capabilities can help your business realize both value and reliability.
Rapid Prototyping
Give your project the running start it deserves with rapid plastic prototyping. Reliant can create an accurate plastic model of your part using the latest rapid prototyping technology in as few as three to five working days. Use these parts to validate your design and reveal any design issues before a production tool is released, saving time and money.
Reliant uses SLA (stereolithography), a plastic rapid prototyping process that uses a powerful UV light to join material together into a complete part, layer by layer. Characteristics of SLA parts include very good, highly detailed parts with high surface quality, which may feature textured and painted finishes suitable for customer presentations or photographs. Dimensions can be held to within a few thousandths of an inch and used for functional light-duty service. These prototypes are excellent test beds for validating your concepts.
Reliant engineers can also use SLS (selective laser sintering), a process using a powerful CO2 laser to fuse plastic materials in a layer-to-layer fashion, similar to SLA. Characteristics of SLS include good detail and surface quality, which may also feature photo-ready textured and painted finishes. Dimensional quality and speed are equivalent to SLA.
Validate designs and kick-start projects with our fast plastic part prototyping.
CAD/CAM/CNC
From CAD plastic prototyping to part production, we use advanced computerized tools to produce superb results for our partners. Reliant uses SolidWorks and other software, such as AutoCAD, to design parts and products. Complicated parts can be made on our new high-tech 5-axis CNC equipment. Using Mastercam, we can evaluate and use CNC for plastic materials to manufacture parts with varying degrees of complexity. We have experienced manufacturing engineers who can ensure all manufacturing operations run efficiently and at the best cost, saving you time and money.
Reliant also uses Moldflow for in-depth analyses of mold designs before releasing tools into production to evaluate possible production issues. This allows us to make changes to the design and mold far in advance of tooling release. The advanced software eliminates the guesswork and identifies the feasibility of the part design, including critical issues such as gate location, wall thickness optimization and cosmetic concerns like sink marks.
On-site Mold Maintenance and Storage
At Reliant, we’re concerned with keeping your investments safe, too. We have a comprehensive inventory system to keep, track and warehouse your molds from arrival onward. All molds and plastic parts for storage are checked and prepared after each production run by experienced mold technicians. Our climate-controlled storage facility helps ensure a long life for your mold and high-quality parts.
Rethink the way you approach injection mold engineering, production, maintenance and more with Reliant Plastics today.