What is freeform injection molding?
In FIM, a 3D printer creates a mold from a specialized soluble resin. These molds can be designed with intricate geometries that might be very challenging or even impossible to achieve with traditional mold-making methods (using hard metals). Due to the mold material being soluble, it can be dissolved in a special bath after the part is formed, allowing for easy extraction of the final product without damaging complex or delicate features.
We operate the latest version of Nexa3D’s LCD 3D printers, which is the fastest on the market!
Contact us if you want to know how soon we can deliver your first injection-molded prototype, or how little you need to invest to get started.
Keep reading to learn more about our unique offerings in the field of low-volume injection molding.
What is the key benefit of FIM?
Unlike other mold tooling used for prototyping, such as silicone molds, these 3D printed molds allow you to rapidly get samples made with production-intent materials and processes.
This means that you can use them with an injection mold press with the production materials, getting insights into how the final product behaves and looks before hard steel tooling has even been commissioned.
What’s a typical FIM workflow?
(Click the graphic to expand it)
What is the lifespan of a 3D-printed mold?
The lifespan of these 3D-printed molds is short because our objective is to get to the first parts rapidly. This means that we sacrifice the mold tooling if needed and do not aim for high volumes. We typically get one or two shots out of a mold, but benefit by not needing to compromise on design freedom or material choice which is perfect when working with new product designs.
Traditional injection molds, which are usually made from steel, are typically designed to withstand hundreds of thousands of injection cycles. However, the fabrication process of these hard metal molds often takes six weeks or more (including trials & revisions) and is vastly more expensive.
Additionally, you lose your design freedom once the hard steel tooling is cut, because changes are both time-consuming and expensive meaning that you need to be 100% certain that the design is right beforehand. This is quite constraining when developing a new product.
Which materials can be used in FIM?
Unlike traditional injection molding, FIM allows the use of different materials including common thermoplastics, silicone, metal, and even ceramics. This means that injection-molded prototype parts are within reach using this process for a whole number of industries, including medical, automotive, and other regulated industries.
Importantly, FIM allows you to use production-intent materials in your prototypes, meaning that you can validate and test parts and products that are already close to your final production version.
Here you can see the same part made from common injection mold polymers PEEK (left) and recycled PP using 3D printed dissolvable molds created via FIM:
Why use freeform injection molding for plastic parts?
Let’s assume you are developing custom-designed plastic parts that will need to be molded.
FIM allows you to speed up the plan-design-prototype-test cycle. You can get production-grade (representative) parts that use the same materials as in mass production in as little as 8-10 days, enabling an early validation of and validate their design. If time is of the essence, you may even want to have several versions of the same part made this way at the same time – which would be prohibitively expensive to do with conventional metal tooling.
FIM thus It provides a bridge cross between 3D printing and ‘traditional’ plastic injection molding, with the benefits of both:
- 3D printing can quickly and cheaply produce parts with complex and intricate geometries, but not in production-intent materials. FIM provides the same level of design freedom as 3D-printing, but without the restrictions on choice of materials
- Traditional hard steel molds are supremely versatile, but take a long time to fabricate, are expensive, and each revision takes time & money. FIM provides the same level of versatility, but without the leadtimes and initial investments, since FIM tooling can be dissolved, allowing you to de-mold parts that have undercuts and would usually necessitate complex side actions inside the mold.
But certain shapes cannot be de-molded without side actions inside the mold, right?
Freeform Injection Molding (FIM) is an innovative process that bridges the gap between 3D printing and traditional injection molding typically using hard steel mold tooling, providing a highly flexible solution for prototyping and, in certain cases, small-scale production runs – for the entire range of geometries you may want to mold, and in the entire range of moldable materials.
FIM is just one part of our in-house injection molding capability
We focus on highly-engineered tooling here, and freeform injection molding is just one part of the puzzle often used in the prototyping stages for new products. Our injection molding team provides:
- Mold tooling design
- Tooling machining shop
- Injection molding facility
Because, at the end of the day, you are not looking for prototypes. You are looking for the fastest, cheapest way to get your product to market, and we can help you from the first step of the design process all the way to the fully scaled-up serial production.
Our group includes a dedicated mold tooling design and fabrication and injection molding facility with multiple mold presses. A few photos from our tooling fabrication shop:
Here are several of our injection mold presses in use to produce parts for our customers:
Tell us about your project
Fill out this simple form to contact us directly about getting your freeform injection molded parts, and do take advantage of the ‘upload part’ function* as this will allow us to see the part you’re planning to make. That helps us understand your needs and get started sooner.
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