Contracted Injection Molding: From Idea to Item

Recently, an experienced member of our team spoke at Molding 2018 to share her expert knowledge on liquid silicone rubber molding and production processes. Corie Yodis detailed how Extreme Molding partners with customers from concept to creation and beyond. Transparency is one of our core values, so it was great to be able to share our processes with our peers. Let’s take a look at what Corie covered during her session, and what our processes mean for new partners.

Evaluation

We appreciate there’s a lot of information that manufacturers (from the USA and from overseas) tend to require before they can provide you with estimates, but there’s a good reason for this. Before we move forward, we at Extreme Molding focus on partnering with companies and people who are a great fit with what we stand for, and our processes. With each and every potential partner we evaluate their product, material requirements, and other information to gain an understanding of exactly who they are. One thing we make sure of, is that we have a passion and interest for their product. A number of our partners are offering novel products to their consumers and, as such, we’re always willing to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect intellectual property at this stage.

After the initial contact occurs, we take a look at the design files and offer advice when needed. Often, potential customers have limited experience with silicone injection molding, and this can mean they sometimes approach manufacturers with designs that are not necessarily manufacturable. We find it important to communicate expectations, and timelines, as well as feasibility before providing a quote. As we’ve written about before, the shape, color, and CAD drawing files of your product all matter if you want to take it from concept to complete product or start reshoring to the USA. Once we have a manufacturable product in concept, we provide a quote. This quote is broken down into material costs, labor, and even our own expected profit margin – transparency isn’t just something we talk about, it’s something we offer at every step of the manufacturing process.

Material Selection

One of the best things about having a USA based manufacturer as your supplier is that we can provide valuable, timely, and expert feedback on mold design, material selection, and color matching using our some 60+ combined years of experience in business and industry to make sure your resulting mold is as efficient as possible. During mold design (normally a 2-week process) we assist in design to make sure your mold is as efficient as possible. Once design is complete, we can calculate the material amount required for the production cycle and carry out a color matching.

Injection mold lead times are normally anywhere between 6 to 12 weeks as the design is refined to your requirements. A key component of this timeline is checking the completed mold against the design and physically confirming the dimensions for compliance. We’re capable of creating products that are FDA approved, BPA free and suitable for use by high-end consumers, in healthcare applications, with children, in the food industry, and with pets. We never want to compromise quality or safety of a product, so checking the physical mold to design is crucial for ensuring the high quality of your final product.

First Article Approval

Quality control is a key component of our process, so our first article inspection is rigorous. When we send the first final part to the quality department to check tolerance, they spend time examining this against original designs and ensuring quality. Any issues will be addressed immediately. If all is well, we move into full-scale production.

Production & Beyond

With over 60 team members working three shifts, seven days a week, we can be responsive to your needs and begin production in tight schedules.

We also have a number of secondary processes we carry out for our partners including packaging and fulfillment, overmolding, coating with adhesives, cryogenic deflashing and more. While these need to be discussed before manufacturing in order for us to carry out the most efficient processes and design packaging even before molding, the processes themselves will occur after molding. At Extreme Molding we value offering a quality service that is tailored to your needs, so we don’t treat secondary processes as just another add-on. If you require secondary processes, we understand that these can be just as important as manufacturing the components you require.

More Details

Take a look at Corie’s presentation for more details on our processes. With over sixty years combined experience at Extreme Molding, getting in touch with us for a free consultation today could make all the difference when taking your design and manufacturing your silicone product. For a more detailed overview of our processes, check out our page on working with us.

To see Corie’s full presentation, covering our processes, take a look at the embedded slides below: