Tool Making for Plastic Moulding

DLS Daneplast has many years of experience designing products, designing tools and manufacturing plastic injeciton moulds. Turning our customers ideas into a viable product that can be manufactured efficiently and reliably is one of the most interesting parts of our work. We can provide assistance with all aspects of plastic products. Together with our sister company, DLS Plastics we can offer Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) manufacturing on modern computer systems. This enables us to quickly "sketch" out a potential solution and work this up to a fully fledged project design.

We are able to accept output from a variety of CAD packages that customers might use in standard file formats like "STEP" and "IGES". This means that we can integrate with 3rd party product deigners or take customer designs and tweak them so that they can be manufactured reliably and efficiently.

Many of the tools that we manufacture in house are made from aluminium which is ideal for short manufacturing runs or products that are required urgently. Aluminium is quick to work with and can withstand years of work. We have several tools that are over 10 years old manufacturing over 100,000 cycles per year! Steel tools offer greater wearability and are necessary if the manufacturing volumes are high or the material used is abrasive. Often nylons and some engineering grade materials require steel tools to maintain a reliable product specification over the life of the product.

We have a number of bolster tooling systems that are ideal for quick manufacture of simple products. We usually carry a stock of blank plates that can be quickly engineered to create moulding cavities ready for injection moulding. These have been invaluable over the years in helping cutomers who have extremely short lead times or have been let down by other tool makers. Lead times obviously depend on work load but if you are stuck give us a call to see what we can do to help!

Steel can be heat and chemically treated to increase resiliance still further. For very high volume high specification products this type of treatment is sensible and is a worthshile investment. The choice of tool material, aluminium, steel or hardened steel depends on the customer requirements. Please contact us for further advice or to talk through what you think might suit you best. Our aim is to find the best solution for you and we can assist further with through our contacts with approved 3rd party tool makers based throughout the East Midlands.