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Injection Mold Bottle Opener
For this project, we designed a Olin logo shaped bottle opener to be manufactured using CNC milling, waterjetting, and injection molding techniques. All components of the final product were designed using SolidWorks CAD/CAM techniques. An overarching goal of the project was to design a product that could be easily mass manufactured with injection molding and involved at least 2 components in assembly. Our assembly was achieved by over molding plastic onto metal blanks, which is detailed further below.
Above is the CAM simulation we created for our mold using HSMWorks within SolidWorks, both halves of which were machined from stainless steel blanks. Both halves of our mold were identical except for the top half having the addition of a sprue hole and small air vents. The blanks were given to us with hole clearances for the sprue and locating pins pre-machined. Once both halves of our mold were successfully machined, we were able to place our metal blanks inside.
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The blanks were waterjet from steel using a drawing file created from our CAD part design. We designed the blank and mold to interface using two small notches on the inner edge of each bottle opener where the blank would be able to rest with a close sliding fit. Both halves of the mold are able to close completely with the blanks inside, and the extra space around the blanks allows for the injection molded plastic to surround them.
The final product was achieved by injection molding blue polypropylene into the mold containing the blanks. Each shoot with the mold produces a sprue and two bottle openers, which can easily be detached by bending the plastic at the thin joint and breaking them off. We then lightly sanded each of the bottle openers where they were attached to the sprue to ensure a smooth finish.
