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155. About minimal injection molding

With the development of technology, there are appeared many different technologies. Such as rapid prototyping, plastic molding, etc. Many of these fall into the categories of hand forming, vacuum forming, conventional milling, CNC milling, injection molding, and sls stereo lithography categories.

In choosing to injection mold the tractor tread pieces for my robot I was taking a large step towards reducing my overall project cost. Specifically, when accounting for my time in machining complex 3-D pieces, even worse, one hundred and forty four of them, one begins to look for other options. The argument proceeds that this is why we have CNC machining. The problem becomes more evident when you take into account the actual part geometry. The piece I dreamed of would require four separate setups in CNC machining and as further investigation proved require producing four separate sets of custom machined complex tooling fixtures to hold onto the part while machining it. So I decided that an injection mold would be the preferred method of part production.

Upon choosing this method of production tooling, advice will flow in. `That technology is for large companies making tens of thousands of parts, they'll say. Not to discount this wonderful advice, in large part this is true, but not in the sense that it applies to the common robotics hobbyist. There are many small shops that are more than willing to do small production runs in molding that are willing and friendly enough to stop and help the little guys.