Looks pretty cool, but you dont list the clamping force. I'm also pretty curious what the plastic screw looks like. also is there a specific resin you are supposed to use to make the tools?
Check out our website. There is a spec section and a link to our Instagram page with a lot more pictures. All the details your looking for and more can be found there. www.micro-molder.com
So the overall working are or platen size on MM is 5.75" x 5.75". This give you the ability to mount anything under that size. Water cooling isn't an included feature for the smaller MM but our bigger MM+ does have water inlet/outlet and a solenoid for liquid incorporated into the chassis. A reservoir and pump system would be an add on purchase or you could piece together your own water system. Both machines do have a compressed air inlets and GUI control integrated so you can use air for part cooling if needed. We have yet to need water cooling on MM but it could be added by the user if a tool required.
@@ShopBotix Thanks for the reply! Will definetly need watercooling , as you can use the advantage of 3d printing with the tooling/insert design. Is there a minimum Requiems thickness for the platten in regard to the injection pressure? And when will the kickstarter machines be available for delivery? Btw I studied at Colorado School of Mines, loved it there!
@@Allmentux Water cooling on a printed tool has yet to become a need for anything we have tested. Tool failure happens way before thermal issues come into play. The thermal energy just doesn't migrate fast enough through the SLA resin to transfer from the tool to the water. Thermal shock will likely be the first thing to cause the tool to fail with a water line. Though this is all assumptions as we have yet to test any type of printed tool with water lines integrated into it. Our platen plates are 1" thick 6061. The campaign "rewards" are tiered delivery schedules. All our current delivery schedules estimates are in 2021. I was apart of sponsoring a few capstone senior projects at the School of Mines for a couple of years. Still in touch with a few professors. Very good school!
Wow, looking good. I have one of the manual (lever operated) plastic injection machines that I've converted to pneumatic and arduino control via solenoid air valves. It works well, with about a 1% fail rate of under or over injection. But it requires me to do operate it because its finicky and I wouldn't trust one of my employees to do it. I would love a machine like this if the price is right. Also, I make my own molds on a small CNC mill. Do you have any specs on what will be required to make molds for this machine? If I'm confident I can keep making my own molds I think this is a pretty likely purchase for me.
Thanks for the comment. You bring up a great point on injection molding being "finicky". We have posted a couple of blogs on our website discussing a few of the "finicky" areas. A lot of people thing injection molding as simple as closing the tool and injecting melted plastic. Wish this was the case, but as you know, it isn't. However once the right machine settings are found and the process for the specific tool is dialed the output success rate is higher. We often preach that injection molding is more of an art than a science, and proper tooling design is critical. Our platen bolt pattern will available for download after our campaign and we are confident that if your making tools now you will be able to make tools for MM. Fortunately MM is a smaller machine so tooling fabrication is fairly manageable on most CNC mills. Again, thanks for the comment and feedback!
@@ShopBotix Thanks! I signed up for updates on the kickstarter and will follow this closely. My pneumatic approach works pretty well, but only because I have the arduino time the injections and I shorten or lengthen time between injections to handle under or over injection. I have an interface where I can adjust inject, dwell and retract times for the valves to be opened by the arduino. But once that's close it still needs small adjustments as temps change over a production run. If it over injects, I inject sooner and the slightly lower temps result in less injection. Opposite for under injection. But this isn't something I can turn loose with someone who isn't analyzing each injection. I want a $10/hour person pushing the button, not me. :) I'll keep watching your work!
@@billstrahan4791 With a high quality tool (correct draft, wall thickness, surface finish and proper ejector pin placement) all you should need to do is enter the number you want to make and push the button once. From there the machine will do the rest. But success is highly contingent on many factors that are not associated with the machine functions. Type of plastic, moisture in the plastic, wall thickness, injection speed, injection time, sprue design, runner design, gate type and location....the list goes on. And this is just talking about aluminum tooling. 3D printed tooling is another level of factors to deal with. To assist in the trial and error process of tool design and efficient operation MicroMolder can save all your tool settings for future and adjustments can be made on the fly.
Probably going to be >15.000$... Got a customized Lab-Scale injection molding machine from China last month for 7000US$. That thing Features larger Molds and up to 30 grams shot weight...
@@skippy18 I was thinking $8 - $12K which would still put it out of reach of my pockets for now. The part that makes me question this is that it's going up on Kickstarter. I don't see something that expensive being successful without some type of guarantee. I'm still feeling burnt by the couple hundred I lost on the Coolest Cooler project.
@@ShopBotix much respect for this reply. I honestly didn't think you would answer it. Less than $4K is attractive and certainly something you should be proud of. I want to see you guys succeed and if I could buy it outright today I probably would at that price. Kickstarter scares me and so I probably will end up being a 2021 customer.
@@XxManagedxX completely understandable. We started our product development effort about two years ago for this project and have been sharing the progress via Instagram to help build trust and transparency knowing that if we went down the Kickstarter route it could turn some people off. There was a campaign in 2016 for a desktop molder that promised wax, plastic and aluminum injection all in one machine. Needless to say they never delivered to a single backer. Our story is different in that we come from the consumer product engineering and development world so this type of stuff is our daily norm. MicroMolder does one thing, injects plastic into a tool and we have documented dozens of examples. We saw the opportunity to center the machine design round 3D printed tooling and so we did. This machine paired with printed tooling completely changed our workflow and prototyping methods. Going from CAD design to injection molded part in less than 12 hours was astonishing and we felt others might benefit from this machine. Again thanks for the interest! It's always great to see someone at the very least take notice and say great job! Thank you!
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How can I buy the machine? and how much does the machine cost 1 this
Looks pretty cool, but you dont list the clamping force. I'm also pretty curious what the plastic screw looks like. also is there a specific resin you are supposed to use to make the tools?
Check out our website. There is a spec section and a link to our Instagram page with a lot more pictures. All the details your looking for and more can be found there. www.micro-molder.com
First :) Awesome! Looking forward. Do you allow for watercooling of the insert? And how big can it be?
So the overall working are or platen size on MM is 5.75" x 5.75". This give you the ability to mount anything under that size. Water cooling isn't an included feature for the smaller MM but our bigger MM+ does have water inlet/outlet and a solenoid for liquid incorporated into the chassis. A reservoir and pump system would be an add on purchase or you could piece together your own water system. Both machines do have a compressed air inlets and GUI control integrated so you can use air for part cooling if needed. We have yet to need water cooling on MM but it could be added by the user if a tool required.
@@ShopBotix Thanks for the reply! Will definetly need watercooling , as you can use the advantage of 3d printing with the tooling/insert design. Is there a minimum Requiems thickness for the platten in regard to the injection pressure? And when will the kickstarter machines be available for delivery?
Btw I studied at Colorado School of Mines, loved it there!
@@Allmentux Water cooling on a printed tool has yet to become a need for anything we have tested. Tool failure happens way before thermal issues come into play. The thermal energy just doesn't migrate fast enough through the SLA resin to transfer from the tool to the water. Thermal shock will likely be the first thing to cause the tool to fail with a water line. Though this is all assumptions as we have yet to test any type of printed tool with water lines integrated into it. Our platen plates are 1" thick 6061. The campaign "rewards" are tiered delivery schedules. All our current delivery schedules estimates are in 2021.
I was apart of sponsoring a few capstone senior projects at the School of Mines for a couple of years. Still in touch with a few professors. Very good school!
I want the first one!
Wow, looking good. I have one of the manual (lever operated) plastic injection machines that I've converted to pneumatic and arduino control via solenoid air valves. It works well, with about a 1% fail rate of under or over injection. But it requires me to do operate it because its finicky and I wouldn't trust one of my employees to do it. I would love a machine like this if the price is right. Also, I make my own molds on a small CNC mill. Do you have any specs on what will be required to make molds for this machine? If I'm confident I can keep making my own molds I think this is a pretty likely purchase for me.
Thanks for the comment. You bring up a great point on injection molding being "finicky". We have posted a couple of blogs on our website discussing a few of the "finicky" areas. A lot of people thing injection molding as simple as closing the tool and injecting melted plastic. Wish this was the case, but as you know, it isn't. However once the right machine settings are found and the process for the specific tool is dialed the output success rate is higher. We often preach that injection molding is more of an art than a science, and proper tooling design is critical. Our platen bolt pattern will available for download after our campaign and we are confident that if your making tools now you will be able to make tools for MM. Fortunately MM is a smaller machine so tooling fabrication is fairly manageable on most CNC mills. Again, thanks for the comment and feedback!
@@ShopBotix Thanks! I signed up for updates on the kickstarter and will follow this closely. My pneumatic approach works pretty well, but only because I have the arduino time the injections and I shorten or lengthen time between injections to handle under or over injection.
I have an interface where I can adjust inject, dwell and retract times for the valves to be opened by the arduino. But once that's close it still needs small adjustments as temps change over a production run.
If it over injects, I inject sooner and the slightly lower temps result in less injection. Opposite for under injection. But this isn't something I can turn loose with someone who isn't analyzing each injection. I want a $10/hour person pushing the button, not me. :) I'll keep watching your work!
@@billstrahan4791 With a high quality tool (correct draft, wall thickness, surface finish and proper ejector pin placement) all you should need to do is enter the number you want to make and push the button once. From there the machine will do the rest. But success is highly contingent on many factors that are not associated with the machine functions. Type of plastic, moisture in the plastic, wall thickness, injection speed, injection time, sprue design, runner design, gate type and location....the list goes on. And this is just talking about aluminum tooling. 3D printed tooling is another level of factors to deal with. To assist in the trial and error process of tool design and efficient operation MicroMolder can save all your tool settings for future and adjustments can be made on the fly.
Wanna leak the price so I know if I should get excited or not?
Probably going to be >15.000$...
Got a customized Lab-Scale injection molding machine from China last month for 7000US$. That thing Features larger Molds and up to 30 grams shot weight...
@@skippy18 I was thinking $8 - $12K which would still put it out of reach of my pockets for now. The part that makes me question this is that it's going up on Kickstarter. I don't see something that expensive being successful without some type of guarantee. I'm still feeling burnt by the couple hundred I lost on the Coolest Cooler project.
@@XxManagedxX
@@ShopBotix much respect for this reply. I honestly didn't think you would answer it. Less than $4K is attractive and certainly something you should be proud of. I want to see you guys succeed and if I could buy it outright today I probably would at that price. Kickstarter scares me and so I probably will end up being a 2021 customer.
@@XxManagedxX completely understandable. We started our product development effort about two years ago for this project and have been sharing the progress via Instagram to help build trust and transparency knowing that if we went down the Kickstarter route it could turn some people off. There was a campaign in 2016 for a desktop molder that promised wax, plastic and aluminum injection all in one machine. Needless to say they never delivered to a single backer. Our story is different in that we come from the consumer product engineering and development world so this type of stuff is our daily norm. MicroMolder does one thing, injects plastic into a tool and we have documented dozens of examples. We saw the opportunity to center the machine design round 3D printed tooling and so we did. This machine paired with printed tooling completely changed our workflow and prototyping methods. Going from CAD design to injection molded part in less than 12 hours was astonishing and we felt others might benefit from this machine. Again thanks for the interest! It's always great to see someone at the very least take notice and say great job! Thank you!
How can I buy the machine? and how much does the machine cost 1 this
All this info is on the website. www.micro-molder.com