How To Improve Quality Control in Injection Molding | Jaycon Systems
Quality is essential for any purchase you make. You wouldn’t buy a vehicle without knowing the quality of the make and model. You wouldn’t buy a television without first learning about the quality expected from the manufacturer. When you are making products you hope to see or use, ensuring their quality is one of the most important things to do. Implementing a sound quality control system is a fantastic idea.
Why Is Quality Control Important?
Quality is essential regarding the injection molding your company requires for your various products. Your customers will judge your company based on whether the products and devices work properly. Consider the types of parts being made using injection molding. They typically need to be precise so that they will work properly.
Injection molding is a specialized process that uses molten material, such as plastic, that is then placed into a mold to create the part. The mold is filled under pressure and then cooled so it can solidify. It will then be removed from the mold.
This practice has been around for more than 150 years. It was used to make all products at that time, including billiard balls, toys, containers, tumblers, automotive parts, electronic device parts, musical instruments, outdoor gear, and so much more.
One of the benefits of injection molding is automation. Quality improves using high-quality machines and design, development, assembly, production, and packaging techniques. However, there also needs to be a quality control system to look for areas that need improvement.
These QC systems can vary from one company to another, of course, even when creating similar products. The items made via injection molding need to meet specific criteria, and the quality control system will help to ensure they do.
Companies today need to utilize quality control measures with injection molding. If you aren’t doing the injection mold process yourself, you’ll want to ensure the company you are working with has a QC process.
Let’s look at a few distinct advantages you can gain with proper quality control for injection molding. A quality control system suits your customers and your company’s bottom line.
ENCOURAGE QUALITY CONSCIOUSNESS
Implementing quality control helps increase people’s level of consciousness regarding quality. Everyone working on the project will become more “quality conscious,” which helps achieve a higher quality level in the products produced. When everyone working on the project has quality in mind, there is a lower chance of flawed products making their way through to the market.
REDUCE COSTS
It’s reasonable to ask: Reducing some of the costs associated with producing the product may also be possible. Proper inspection and control can help to highlight and pinpoint where there might be some issues with the process or the materials being created. Finding and fixing those issues ensures less waste and better final products.
By conducting quality control and learning where specific problems might lie, it allows them to be corrected. It could help reduce the time it takes to get products out, not just assist you in reducing costs. It also tends to mean better utilization of resources, which is another way to reduce inefficiencies.
HAPPIER CUSTOMERS
Customers want products that work well and that look good. If you can do that, then there’s a good chance you’ll have happy customers. Quality control measures ensure the products work, while the design ensures that it looks good in those cases where aesthetics might matter.
Working products means happy customers, simple as that. When you have products that fail early, don’t fit, aren’t the correct color, etc., you will have upset customers. You will develop a poor reputation in your field, whatever it might be. Therefore, it’s always in your best interest to work with a company that provides quality control for injection molding. You will find that quality control is essential for just about every part of your business.
FIX PROBLEMS EARLY
Quality control shows you where there might be concerns, perhaps with the design. Finding these issues early makes it easier to fix them before they cause severe problems for your business. Again, this could be issues like the color not being correct, the size being slightly off, etc. Finding these sorts of problems through rigorous testing is essential.
REDUCE RETURNS AND FAILURES
If parts aren’t made according to specifications, there will be returns. This might mean returning pieces to the company that did your mold injections. It might mean customers are returning products to you directly.
Making quality control part of the process from the start will reduce the instances of issues and failures, lowering the rate of returns. Again, this leads to happier customers and a better bottom line for you.
BETTER EMPLOYEE MORALE
Here’s something that not a lot of people consider regarding quality control. Your employees’ morale partially depends on how they feel about the job. If you have a company selling or shipping inferior products, your employees aren’t likely to be happy with their work. They don’t want to deal with customers complaining about low-quality products that don’t work correctly.
Quality control ensures you are selling good products. People are generally more excited to be part of a company that cares about and creates high-quality goods. Employee morale is better at these sorts of companies. They want to know they are working toward something worthwhile.
IMPROVE REPUTATION
You will also find that quality control helps improve the company’s reputation. When you have a company with many faulty products, returns, and other problems that could have been caught with a quality control system, the importance will fall quickly.
Reputation is everything today, and bad news spreads quickly. As soon as someone writes a bad review for a product you develop and it goes on the web, it affects your reputation negatively. By reducing the number of “problem items,” you can help to keep your reputation as intact as possible.
Are There Any Disadvantages to Requiring Quality Control for Injection Molding?
What could the potential disadvantages be when it comes to quality control? There aren’t any negatives to QC. Companies will often only work with manufacturers offering QC as it rarely adds high costs on top of the cost of molding. As you have seen, it could end up helping people to save some money in the end. There are far more positives than there are negatives.
Quality Control Elements to Watch
Products made by injection molding could still have problems and defects, even though the molds are supposed to ensure all products are identical. Therefore, you’ll want to get an idea of the areas you need to look over when it comes to quality control and some areas where defects are more prone to occur.
DIMENSIONAL STABILITY AND SPECS
First, let’s consider dimensional stability. You need to ensure that the products’ dimensions will be exact. If your product is just a single piece that doesn’t have to connect to other items, the measurements will not matter as much. However, ensuring everything is the proper size and dimension is essential when you have components that must fit together correctly. Whether you make all the details to create an item or a product that goes into another device, you must get the size right.
It all starts with a high-quality design for injection molding. From there, it’s essential to use high-quality tools. It can’t be too significant or too small. The shape has to be perfect, as well. Otherwise, it will not fit with the rest of the assembly. Even a tiny imperfection is enough to render a part useless. You can’t do a square peg into a round hole.
Quality control helps ensure that all the items made are of the proper dimension. Any pieces that are not the right size can be removed before they are used, which leads to fewer problems for you and your customers.
COLOR
Although this might not seem like it is as much of a problem, having things the wrong color can be trouble. Injection molding is supposed to be an affordable process allowing you to produce parts relatively quickly without spending too much money.
However, you also want to ensure that you aren’t moving so quickly that you make mistakes like the quality or the color. When process parameters are changed, such as increasing or decreasing temperature, it could affect the product’s color. There could also be different means of coloring the plastic resin. Get things right the first time when choosing a color for injection molding.
Why does color matter? It matters for several reasons. For starters, you want to ensure that everything you do is consistent from start to finish each time out. This helps to ensure quality, and it can help to build up trust—color matters for more than just consistency with aesthetics. Color can also be used for shorthand. For example, you can use different colors for different types of products.
Regardless, you will want to ensure the colors match as closely as possible. They should be within a shade or two, or it could confuse assembly. Other times, the wrong colors make a product look off.
For lower-end products, the exact color might not seem like it matters much. However, if you are trying to impress customers and ship high-quality products, you need quality control for the color.
FINISH AND GLOSS
Here’s an element that matters even less than color to some. However, despite being a small detail, it can significantly affect how a product is perceived. The amount of gloss on the product will vary for various reasons, including the resin used to create the effect. Different types of products may warrant more or less front. Regardless, it’s a good idea to be consistent here, too.
Gloss and aesthetics are closely tied together. How a product is used will often determine the amount of shine on the finish. For example, products that need to be visually appealing might look better with a glossy appearance or another texture. The style chosen will ultimately be up to you, but this is something else you’ll likely want the quality control team to watch for. Remember the importance of consistency.
Common Defects and Problem Areas
While the above areas are essential, the quality control team may find many other molding defects that could end up causing some serious problems for products and your customers. Below, we’ll look at some of the major issues your QC team should watch for with the consequences.
SINK MARKS
This term is used for small depressions and indentations, often on the thicker parts of injection molded products. This can happen because the material shrinks when insufficient time to cool entirely before mold removal. These could also be caused because of low pressure in the molding cavities. In some cases, it means that the molding temperature was too high.
FLOW AND WELD LINES
These are streaks or lines that appear on the final molded part. In some cases, the lines will be discolored compared to the rest of the product. This could have occurred because the plastic is cooling at different rates when it flows through the mold. Typically, the lines will happen at the spots where two lines meet in the mold.
They can also occur when the injection speed of the plastic is too slow. This will end up allowing the resin to cool too fast. In some cases, the wall thickness might vary between the sections inside the mold. Regardless, it means trouble, and it is something quality control will want to watch for.
PART LINES
Part lines are a natural byproduct of injection molding. Good design often hides unsightly seams where parts of a mold come together. Low production quality can make these lines more prominent and makes products feel cheaper. Check out our clip about part lines below!
SHORT SHOTS
Although the process should be automated, there are still instances where insufficient plastic is added to the mold for one reason. This will cause problems. If the mold is not filled with molten plastic, what happens? It means there will be areas on the product that come out of the mold that doesn’t exist because insufficient plastic was poured. The final product is incomplete, which renders it useless.
FLASHING
The term flashing is used for any plastic that escapes the mold cavity during the injection molding process. The excess might get out through ejector pin locations, the parting lines, etc. If insufficient pressure prevents the plastic from cooling or escaping the mold, you will get flashing. In some cases, removing the flashing from the piece is possible, and it will still be usable. However, this takes time, and it doesn’t always work. It’s better to reduce the possibility of flashing in the first place with a better company for injection molds.
BURN MARKS
It could be due to overheating if you see discolored parts that are dark brown or black, or dark red. The product may have gotten too how, which means it could have some burn marks on it. While the burn marks might not be a significant problem if it’s slight discoloration on a part that’s never going to be seen, the damage to the plastic is the real problem. For example, the heat could have warped the plastic and slightly changed its shape.
Most of the time, these parts will need to be discarded, and new ones will need to be made. When these problems become more common, it may be time to examine the injection molds themselves and decide if a new steel or aluminum mold is necessary. These burn marks and the other issues in this section are the things that quality control should help to find.
Get Help from a Quality Company for Your Injection Molding
When hiring another company to handle your injection molding, you always want to choose a company that offers the best results possible. When you work with a reputable company for your injection molding, you will find that most of the above issues will not be a problem.
Try looking for a company that will provide you with the quality control services you need. If the company doesn’t have quality control, you will have to implement it independently. If you have to order a lot from the company, it’s always better to ensure you’re choosing a business that already offers quality control services.
Talk with Professionals
Are you looking for a company to help you with your injection molding needs? Maybe you want a company that also takes quality control seriously, so you can be sure you’re getting only the best parts that will work for your devices. Take the time to talk with the experts like Jaycon Systems about their quality control method and how it can help with the products/devices you create.
