Manufacturing

No going back

 

At some point the designing stops and the committing begins.

 

Manufacturing was that point. Everything up until now — the CAD work, the prototypes, the supplier negotiations — had some degree of reversibility. You could reprint a part, retest a mechanism, switch a supplier. The moment the molds were cut, that flexibility was gone.

 

 

Working With the Injection Molding Engineers

We did not have the expertise to design the molds ourselves. Injection molding is a specialist discipline, and the tooling that goes into a mold at production scale is a different problem entirely from designing the parts that come out of it.

 

After talking to a number of manufacturers we settled on a supplier whose engineers worked with us directly. They reviewed our designs, understood what we were trying to achieve, and made final adjustments where they knew better than we did. Which, in some areas, they did.

 

That collaboration mattered. Handing a finished CAD file to a factory and hoping for the best is not how this works — at least not well. The people cutting the molds have seen thousands of parts come out of machines. They know what causes problems. Listening to them saved us from mistakes we would not have caught ourselves.

 

 

How a Mold Is Made

A mold starts as a solid block of steel or aluminium. The negative shape of your part — every surface, every detail, every tolerance — is machined directly into that block. What comes out of the machine is a cavity that, when filled with molten plastic under pressure, produces your part.

 

For this model we ended up with a set of four molds. One of those molds runs a double cycle — meaning it produces two parts per injection rather than one.

 

 

"If you want to know how much a mold costs, look it up. You will be surprised."

 

The cost of tooling is one of the more shocking realities of physical product manufacturing. Each mold represents a significant investment — the kind of number that makes you sit with your decisions for a long time before committing to them.

 

The Weight of a Decision You Cannot Undo

The anxiety leading up to mold production was real.

 

Once a mold is cut, changes to the design are either impossible or extremely expensive. You can sometimes add material to a mold cavity — but removing it, which is what most design changes require, means cutting into the steel again or in many cases scrapping the mold entirely and starting over.

 

Months of prototyping, hundreds of iterations, all the back-and-forth with the engineers — all of it was preparation for a moment where we had to look at our designs and say: we are confident enough in this to lock it in permanently.

 

"If you want to change something after the mold is created — it's not possible. Or at the very least, very limited."

 

We were as ready as we could be. We had tested everything we could test. We had fixed everything we had found. We knew the designs were good.

 

It was still nerve-wracking.

 

And Then the Parts Started Coming Out

The molds were made. Production began. And the parts that came out of those machines were — after everything — what we had designed them to be.

 

That moment, holding an injection molded part for the first time and seeing that the tolerances were right, the mechanisms worked, the surface finish was clean — it is difficult to describe after the length of the road that led there.

 

 

Next up: Assembly and Quality Control.

What happens after the parts come out of the molds — putting it all together, checking every mechanism, and making sure what goes in the box is something we're proud to put our name on.