Can Mold maker choose Plastic Molding Material

The answer is, of course, yes. Plastic Mold Maker can mold anything, right? More of the companies moving into MIM these days are moving in from plastics molding than from any other quarter. They’re following existing customers there, and finding new ones.

Many who have called MIM home for a while now-like Steve James, executive vp of MIM molder Injectamax Corp. (Escondido, CA)-welcome the additional business plastics molders are bringing into their changing neighborhood. But James and others like him are quick to write some words of warning on the welcome mat: “We hope that nobody enters in innocence and sours a market on the technology.” Intelligence Intensive Paul Hauck, director of design engineering, marketing, and sales for another MIM molder, Kinetics Inc. (Wilsonville, OR), explains that this innocence may stem from a basic misunderstanding of what’s involved. “The common response to your question is probably ‘yes,'” he says. “Yes, but. It’s true the technology is very capital intensive. One very important piece that is missing from that, though, is that the technology is also very intelligence intensive.” Hauck speaks for the majority of those already serving IMMC markets that we contacted for this special report. He stresses that success in MIM requires interdisciplinary technological expertise. MIM integrates a variety of separate-but-equal disciplines, including powder metallurgy, feedstock formulation, compounding, setter staging, debinding, and sintering. All this and more, and molding, too. Everything has to work together seamlessly all the time to make consistently good parts. Sure, anyone can invest the capital. But as Dunstan H. Peiris of Singapore MIM molder Ceramet Technologies asks, “Does buying a lathe make you a machine shop?”

The Answer Hauck recommends that companies that are interested in MIM first determine whether they already have the talent in-house, or whether they can draw appropriate talent from elsewhere. This is the first thing they must do before deciding to make the move. Others echo his advice. Neal C. Nordstrom, the director of MIM technology at Carpenter Parmatech (Petaluma, CA), explains some of the consequences: “We have some very good competitors, but there are many of them out there who don’t know what they’re doing. MIM is a challenging technology that is more involved than custom plastics molding. It’s growing, but it’s far from mature. Some oversell what MIM can do. We have to go in and try to resell it. MIM has multiple enabling processes. You’ve got to be able to put it all together, or everyone suffers.” Injectamax’s James agrees, concluding, “The worse thing that could happen now that things are at such a critical mass is for someone to land a big account, mess things up, and alienate an entire industry to the technology. The last thing that we need is for ‘MIM’ to become a dirty word.”