Team Tropical Escape has been hard at work this week with the first fabrications of each of our pieces. For it, we have been injection molding and creating/editing our molds.
In the body of the blog post, write a brief summary of what you have learned from this exercise, and include a few photos of your first parts/assembly
A PDF of the write-up for our first injection molded parts can be found here.
The fabrication of our pieces has been exiting because it has allowed us to bring to life what we designed. For each piece, we have had a problem, and through this have learned of the importance of beginning production early to allot time for debugging and fixing molds if needed. Within this past week, we've had to re-machine two molds. However, for those molds working and fabricating pieces, the main parameters of the ENGEL machine that we have been experimenting with to be able to reach the adequate production values have been shot size, packing time, and cooling time.
For all parts, we have experimented with short shots, flashes, and some dishing. The process of fabricating the parts has not only taught us time management is critical, but it has also shown us many unaccounted or unexpected problems that had not been thought of before arise when preparing to produce parts. Furthermore, we have also learned that some issues can be fixed by switching parameters in the machine rather than re-doing a mold.
- B
To start off with our B, our previous post highlighted a bit of the journey to the first creations of it. We finally got a finished B with no flash. All the information for these tests can be found on this document (2 tabs for two different tests days).
Here are pictures of our produced Bs.
Note: We have noticed the line in the top left edge indicating the meeting of two flowing points for the B. To eliminate this, we will experiment with increasing shot size and increasing the injection pressure.
B Overmold
The overmold worked well on the first try and many issues were fixed
Team Tropical Escape!