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fed up with mini randomness...back to counters? (teeny-tiny rant)
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<blockquote data-quote="DaveStebbins" data-source="post: 1788615" data-attributes="member: 1427"><p>Again, I'm not sure how things work in miniatures manufacturing, but in general manufacturing most molds for plastic are made of hardened steel. They also wear rather quickly, especially if they are trying to hold lots of close tolerances or fine detail. Generally, plastic parts are cheap because the plastic is injected at high temperature, high pressure and high speed which reduces the cycle time to make each piece. However, all of these circumstances cause molds to wear more quickly.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Very true. It is easy to look at a small piece of plastic and think that there isn't much money involved in making it. This is true if you are making them in high volume to spread out the tooling costs, or if you can allow large tolerances to account for mold wear and refurbish or rebuild tooling less frequently, or if the mold can be manufactured by conventional machining techniques. However, I would imagine that molds for plastic miniatures are made on EDM machines (I think that's <strong>e</strong>lectro-<strong>d</strong>ischarge <strong>m</strong>achining), which are extremely expensive machines to purchase and thus carry a high hourly production cost and a relatively slow material removal rate. However, they are unparalleled for making the kinds of complex 3-D shapes required in a mini.</p><p></p><p>Again, this is all just semi-educated guesswork on my part.</p><p>-Dave</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DaveStebbins, post: 1788615, member: 1427"] Again, I'm not sure how things work in miniatures manufacturing, but in general manufacturing most molds for plastic are made of hardened steel. They also wear rather quickly, especially if they are trying to hold lots of close tolerances or fine detail. Generally, plastic parts are cheap because the plastic is injected at high temperature, high pressure and high speed which reduces the cycle time to make each piece. However, all of these circumstances cause molds to wear more quickly. Very true. It is easy to look at a small piece of plastic and think that there isn't much money involved in making it. This is true if you are making them in high volume to spread out the tooling costs, or if you can allow large tolerances to account for mold wear and refurbish or rebuild tooling less frequently, or if the mold can be manufactured by conventional machining techniques. However, I would imagine that molds for plastic miniatures are made on EDM machines (I think that's [B]e[/B]lectro-[B]d[/B]ischarge [B]m[/B]achining), which are extremely expensive machines to purchase and thus carry a high hourly production cost and a relatively slow material removal rate. However, they are unparalleled for making the kinds of complex 3-D shapes required in a mini. Again, this is all just semi-educated guesswork on my part. -Dave [/QUOTE]
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fed up with mini randomness...back to counters? (teeny-tiny rant)
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