Many manufacturers utilize injection molding for the production of their plastic enclosures and components. When working with the right company, China tooling tends to be the right blend of quality, low cost, and relatively high speed. That’s why many importers get their tooling fabricated in China, even when production is set to take place abroad.
It is particularly common for plastic injection molds.
There are reasons to do it this way rather than getting the tooling made in your country of production, but also some risks, too. Let’s take a look…
Why buy China tooling?
Where to begin? China is full of really capable tooling fabrication workshops that offer decades of experience. Their prices tend to be lower than in other Asian countries or in Europe/North America.
Yes, you need to be careful about protecting your IP, as the toolmaker, by necessity, needs to know quite a lot of information about your product, not least its design (if a mold is used to make your product’s enclosure), but if this is done then you can expect good results if you picked the right people to work with.
What if you’re planning to import tooling to your country for use?
If your plastic production is not going to be done in China you’re going to need to get the tooling exported and this opens up a few potential issues.
1. You need to source a Chinese toolmaker who has export experience
Tooling for export may need to be of a higher quality than that made for domestic use because foreign plastic injection molding factories may have stricter standards to adhere to. Therefore, it’s likely that this toolmaker will charge more, but also that they will understand what tooling to be used abroad must be like and also, perhaps, be able to handle the export and shipping process, too.
2. You need to be very clear on your injection molding factory’s requirements to your toolmaker
The key here is to get tooling made in China with the minimum of risks that it will be shipped to another country and found to have issues necessitating being returned to China for rework and then shipped, once again, back to the factory. That’s a real risk here if you don’t get very clear requirements from your molding factory, such as mold complexity, number of cavities, the type of machine that will be used, etc.
Then communicate with the Chinese toolmaker to double-check that they fully comprehend the requirements before fabrication takes place.
3. Request your factory to be patient
One key success factor here will be the acceptance of molds fabricated in China by your injection molding factory/supplier. There may be resistance and they may only do a quick trial before stating that the tooling isn’t working, but they need to be patient and trust that you have found the right toolmaker and validated the tooling thoroughly (more on this later).
Will the tooling cost more, and why?
Yes, that’s something you’ll need to budget for. In our experience, tooling fabricated for export can be around 50% more costly than that made for domestic use because suppliers need a higher validation process and generally have better processes.
How to avoid issues with the tooling before it’s shipped?
A very worthwhile activity, in this case, is to undertake thorough validation of the tooling before it is shipped abroad, otherwise, there is a relatively high risk of having to send it back for rework. Sofeast commonly helps customers with this cases like this where proper validation is very important, we supervise mold fabrication and pilot runs, sending an engineer to do the following:
- Check the mold based on our standard checklist, and write our observations
- Record the setup parameters (time, pressure, temperature…)
- Record how many shots are necessary before the parts off the mold are good based on our observation
- Record information on the machine
- Record the effective cycle time
- Check if the factory checks the parts periodically (every 1 hour), especially for CTQ points
- See if the factory records their QC findings and use them to calculate, for instance, the Cpk index
- Check if there are quality issues with the parts that are made
Plenty of data will be gained from this validation and that can be provided to the factory to ‘prove’ that the tooling is actually working correctly and reaches their requirements.
Learn more about this solution and get a quotation here: Mold Capability Validation Supervision (in China)
P.S.
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