After you have designed your plastic or composite component, you need to engage with someone to make the mold that will be used to injection mold that component. A designer will envision what it will take to make a cavity or cavities (for higher volume parts) in a steel mold frame.
Price shopping for molds can be a risky undertaking. You immediately enter the realm of “you get what you pay for” melded with “just because you paid a lot doesn’t mean you get a lot”.
A mold quote is based upon what that designer envisioned. After winning the bid, the designer coverts the vision into design and the mold shop coverts the design into reality. All along that path, the vision may evolve, the design may evolve, the build may evolve. Or the mold just gets built as conceived because anything different may/would cost more but the price is already set.
You end up with a mold that might have issues or is compromised from making consistently good parts.
Now imagine if that mold was sourced and acquired from offshore.
I say all this because we have yet another customer (this one returned to us after leaving doing some price shopping) that has asked us to bring in some molds made elsewhere and “make them work”.
This is of course something we have done numerous times. Only a few have left and returned. Others come here for the first time with molds in tow. Others are dual sourced, but the other source cannot get good parts.
Our mold prices are reasonable, and more importantly they are cast in stone. There have been a few times where a design that had been envisioned (which is what the quote was based upon) had to be scrapped and a different design enacted. That responsibility falls on us and we make the mold necessary to make parts to the customers’ expectations.
It helps to have both the mold design, mold shop and production molding, all under the same roof.
So, certainly price shop, but recognize that not all quotes/visions are equal. Talk to your supplier and see how well thought out their vision is. Is the quote based on the part requirements, or the price requirements?
Supplier saying your mold is giving them problems? Then give us a call. We have brought in molds made domestically and from all over the world. In 20 years, we have fixed every mold but one. That mold we could have fixed, but it would cost more than just making a new mold with a different design.