The work of assembling a plastic injection mold is a process step that is always necessary whenever a new mold is prepared. It is very common to carry out the assembly of a mold using the following work procedure.

(1)Confirming the component count of the mold parts
(2)Confirming the procedure of assembling the mold
(3)Provisional assembly of the mold parts
(4)Adjusting the operations
(5)Final assembly of the mold
(6)Confirming the operation in a molding machine
(7)Adjusting the defective locations (if necessary, dismantle and reassemble the mold)

In the process step of assembling a mold, since the results of all operations such as design, machining, finishing, surface treatment, etc., all are collected together, this is also a process step in which any human mistakes or insufficiencies in the respective processes such as design mistakes, machining mistakes, part ordering mistakes, etc., all come out. It is necessary to detect speedily such problematic locations and to arrange for design modifications or machining of the mold. Human mental work or machine processing time are physically required for design modifications or part machining of molds. Whether appropriate and accurate judgment and speedy follow up actions can be done smoothly or not determines the trial schedule of the mold and the amount of time taken to a large extent.

Here, since the parts or data pass through a large number persons and processes until the mold is completed, there will be some inadvertent mistakes in information transmission or misunderstandings by individuals. Although it is important to take actions so that these do not occur, and there are some persons who manage saying "this should never happen according to psychological theory", but that is not an advisable approach. It is very important to have an organization and a command chain system for quickly meeting any problems that have occurred, and this is a realistic approach for such problems.

Let us give you some individual advices for the assembly process.

Verifying the mold assembly procedure

-It is very important to start the assembly work only after thoroughly understanding the assembly procedure. When some work can be carried out simultaneously in parallel, the time taken can be shortened if the work is divided among two or more persons.

Provisional assembly:

-When tightening parts using a hexagonal socket head bolt, etc., all the screws should not be tightened in the beginning, but about four bolts should be selected that take up the maximum force, and these bolts should be provisionally tightened in a balanced manner and in the sequence of opposite bolts first, and these bolts should be tightened fully in the end when the overall position of the part has been finely adjusted. After that, by tightening the remaining bolts, it is possible to stabilize the tightening of the entire mold.

-It is possible to improve the efficiency of the assembly work by the use of small appliances such as steel blocks or pins, sponge, woolen cloth, rubber plates, etc.

Adjusting the operation of the mold:

- In order to confirm the operations of the slide core, ejector pin, return pin, etc., fine adjustments of different parts should be made after thoroughly checking the entire mold. If the work is done by concentrating only on one location right from the start, the assembly will have been done "looking at a tree but not looking at the forest", and hence care should be taken because this can make the mold not to function properly.