Injection Mold Making for Medical Devices

Medical devices usually make direct or indirect contact with human body, it has high standard requirements on mold design and mold making, typical characters of medical parts are high required finish surface, particular structure design, tight tolerance, and food safe material, it is a challenge to the mold makers and injection molding companies.


March 21, 2010, the US House of Representatives pass the health care reform bill by 219 against 212 votes, The largest health care bill ever in US history means the United States formally come into the era of health insurance, this is a great opportunity for the medical devices companies as well as related industries like mold making, ACO Mold, a qualified Chinese mold maker, has built quite a lot of injection molds for medical devices in the past few years, here we are going to share some cases, hope it give you some inspiration, due to intellectual property protection, some of the critical information may not be present.

Basic information:

• Material of part: PP
• Finish: SPI-D/ SPI-A
• Cavity: 1x4
• Typical features: hot nozzle, air release, enforce release

DFM is standard procedure for all the injection mold making projects in ACO Mold, a good DFM report should be to help customers to optimize their part design and provide concept of mold design, basically you can tell a mold maker's engineering capacity by a DFM report, here is a brief list you should go through with your mold maker before cutting steel:

• Mold standard. If the mold will be running in your molding shop, you need to make sure the mold apply to your injection molding machine's standard.
• Injection molding machine specification. The mold designed and made must apply to the injection machine it goes with later after, so ideally, you better get your injection molder involved in on earlier stage, after all, your injection molder is the one to operate the mold.
• Mold cavity layout.
• Parting line, including main parting line and slider parting line.
• Special mechanism, such as sliders, lifters, hydraulic cylinder pull out, unscrew etc.
• Gating. Pay attention to the gate location and make your voice if the gate on critical surface. Make sure the mold can be automatically run,
• Draft angle. Make sure you are ok with the draft impact on your part design, sometimes you need to make compromise.
• Ejection method.
• Cooling layout.
• Engraving, such as date stamp, recycle stamp, material stamp.
• Finish.

We use UG software to do mold design and NC programming, we start with 3D design, 2D layout is also available, usually it takes 3-5 days to get a mold design done. ACO Mold have 6 experienced full time mold designer, and we also work with some professional mold design companies to make sure we always submit design in time.


This injection mold take us 5 weeks to complete, during mold making, we will keep the customers updated once a week by the progress report.


At least one week before injection mold testing, we prepare raw material and reserve proper size injection molding machine for mold testing.


Usually we will do a small volume production before mold shipping, this would make sure the mold is in right production situation when it arrives at the molder's factory.