Injection mold maintenance means performing cleanings and inspections after a set amount of time or cycles to extend the working life of an injection mold. Preventative mold maintenance is critical in protecting your asset and ensuring it keeps producing quality parts.
Ignoring preventative mold maintenance and waiting for your injection mold to break down, will quickly become serious and costly. Repairs result in expense, lost production time, and reduced part quality. When purchasing new injection molds, include preventative mold maintenance to protect your investment and your total cost of ownership for the life of your product.
One of the more common injection mold problems comes from water leaks. These occur around the static seals or where dissimilar metals contact. Companies often wait and band-aid the water leaks, until they stop producing quality parts or it breaks down. These repairs end up more costly in the long run because of the unscheduled production downtime and the increased damage to the mold.
The injection mold condition directly affects the quality of a plastic component. Out-of-spec products caused by a variety of issues that include residual material left in the mold, rust, cracks, or other mold damage result in rejects. In a world that depends on quick turnaround times for parts, preventative maintenance takes a back seat. Neglecting maintenance leads to defects and production of inferior parts, or worse, early retirement of a mold.
Regularly scheduled maintenance of cleanings and inspections needs to occur after the mold runs a set number of cycles. Cleaning and maintenance details are critically important to record. The documentation enables molders to establish standard instructions for mold cleaning, maintenance, and even repair. This documentation shows specific instructions for maintaining the tools like cleaning agents to use, and procedures to follow for each mold.
Your injection molder should be the best qualified to determine the proper mold maintenance schedule because it can be at different rates for each tool. The different rates occur because of specific project details. Details include resin raw material, production environment, type of product, and annual production volumes.
Moisture, extreme temperatures, and pressure take their unique toll on a tool. Rust erodes steel, and injection molds are not immune to this, especially when working 24/7 under heat, pressure, water, and of course, exposure to oxygen. Rust takes no time at all to eat away at a mold. A regularly scheduled cleaning to remove rust is necessary, to avoid the mold-breaking down or producing out-of-spec parts.
Not only is preventative mold maintenance necessary, but also performing the correct tasks. Basic preventative maintenance steps keep your tool producing parts, see list below.
At Crescent Industries, we want to help extend the life your injection mold for as long as possible. For all new injection molds fabricated by Crescent, we establish a documented preventative mold maintenance schedule. One way, Crescent offers continuous quality plastic components for the life of your program.