Plastic injection moulding

[mindflow]

Hi Everyone,

Is design of Plastic injection moldings possible in Free-cad ?

If Yes, which workbench I have to use ?


Sandesh

[chrisb]

Yes of course it is. There is no special workbench, you can use anything to model the 3D objects. Usually you would use one of Part or PartDesign workbench, depending on your personal preferences. German user freecad-heini-1 works in this area, he speaks English too.

[mindflow]

Hi,

Then how to give shrinkage allowance and other parameters in workbench ?

[chrisb]

Wilfried (=freecad-heini-1), do you care to jump in?

ping

[meme2704]

Hi
Fc is very well adapted to draw the parts with clearance, it is enough to inform the value of "Taper angle extern or inter, to have the desired slopes.
sometimes there will be precautions to take with the rays in the corners of 2 walls, it will be necessary to use "Net instead of radiate the basic sketch

[freecad-heini-1]

Wrong post.

[freecad-heini-1]

Hi Everyone,

Is design of Plastic injection moldings possible in Free-cad ?

If Yes, which workbench I have to use ?


Sandesh

Hello Sandesh,
I work in this field. Freecad is really great to design molds. I work with the Part-workbench, but sometimes I use PartDesign for draft / tapper angle. I prepared me a user defined icon bar with tools from different workbenches, like Part-o-magic, Draft-wb, Curves-wb, Surface-wb and Lattice2-wb. For Scaling / shrinkage the scale tool from the draft-wb is perfect. It's possible to shrink in three axis. To design parting-planes Freecad has many different surface tools. To cut or fuse them I use Part-wb split/slice and join wall objects and boolean operations. To split the mold into two halfes and separate cores and sliders, I use split/slice and Lattice2 explode compound. That is fast and elegant. All this commands are full-parametric. I can say that Freecad is very stable and robust, also in case of changes with mold components.
For imported parts with bad quality in step or iges, sometimes it can help to decrease the part quality from 1e-7 to 1e-4 or 1e-3, for this I use the OpenSCAD-wb.
Since OCC7.3 Freecad has a defeaturing tool. Very nice to remove fillets, chamfer or other shapes from imported parts.
I created a Freecad workflow for my daily job and I'm very happy with it. Freecad rocks.
For part-repair, we have the defeaturing-wb and you could install Salome. Salome is a standalone program, based on OpenCascade and has great repair tools.
Best regards
Wilfried

[mindflow]

Thanks Wilfried.

I will give a try.

[mwlandolsi]

Hello everyone,
Thank you for posting this subject. I am a trainer of plastic injection molding. I used to work with SW for mold design. When there is a Clearence there is a tool to close it by making a surface. I discovered recently the powerful results given by freecad and I want also to teach it to my learners. To do so I must prepare some showcases and demo but I am trying to use freecad to split mold cavity, but unfortunately I couldn't. Are there any tutorials about this subject?

[freedman]

mindflow wrote
Then how to give shrinkage allowance and other parameters in workbench ?

I have made a few production molds with FreeCAD. Unless your trying to make your own mold, I just model to scale and send the files to the mold maker, it's their job to scale for shrinkage. Shrinkage is a complex issue and can change in different axis and plastics.