Plastics News promoted MTD’s latest MicroSeries this month as a proactive effort to help clients avoid design mistakes on very small plastic components.
The aim is to manage a customer’s expectations on costs and delivery times.
MTD has identified eight common micro design mistakes that can make the project team “put the brakes on”. The goal is to identify a future problem and streamline the entire process, by keeping these common mishaps front-of-mind for designers.
Most frequent among the mistakes is a customer’s explicit expectation for “zero flash”. Simply put by project manager, John Clark:
Flash is always going to happen, and it never gets better.
Here are a few other recommendations for creating successful designs from the get-go:
- Be flexible, and avoid assigning poor gate locations.
- Stay symmetrical and avoid lopsided tolerances; adjust the part model to be at the midpoint of the tolerance range.
- Avoid nearly impossible tolerance for a critical dimension; sustaining an extremely tight tolerance is challenging on long runs.
Review the full list of 8 common design mistakes, along with examples of each, in MTD’s MicroSeries: How to Avoid the Top 8 Micro Design Mistakes
Read the full Plastics News article here.