Mold Bases and Plates
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Mold Bases: What Every Molder Should Know
Today’s mold-building process is a complex one for the molder, who must grapple with a long list of design details before placing a tooling order It’s understandable that much of the buyer’s attention goes to the “heart” of the injection mold, the core and cavity inserts, since they have the most visible influence on the molded part Yet all sorts of ancillary tooling components, to which the molder might not be inclined to give much thought, can also make or break a mold One item that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is the mold base, even though the wrong one can severely limit a mold’s productivity. Rather than an afterthought, mold base selection should be considered critical to the profit- ability of the entire molding project. When selecting a mold base for a particular job, first ask a few key questions about the part’s design and processing demands: What kind of ejection does it need? Does it have a cam action or some other mold-action device? What are the volume requirements? What type of machine will it run on?
Answer these design and processing questions, and you’ll be well on your way to picking the standardized or special-purpose mold base best suited to your application.
Standard Mold Base Styles For most applications, a standard mold base will fit the bill. The most common of these is the “A-style,” which has the flexibility to fit into the widest variety of molding applications. A-style models have a four-plate design: (from top to bottom) top clamp plate, A-plate, B-plate, support plate, ejector retainer, ejector bar, and ejector housing. Mold makers using an A-style mold base typically machine through pockets in the “A” and “B” plates to accept just about any kind of core and cavity insert. The B-style mold base represents an economy version of the A-style. The B-style’s two-plate design combines the top clamp plate and the “A” plate into one component called the “A-Clamping Plate” or ACP. Likewise, a beefed-up “B” plate eliminates the need for a support plate on the core side of the mold. Molders can use the less-costly “B” Series when the part design allows the cavity and core to be machined directly into the cavity plates. If the mold will be used with cavity inserts, they must be machined into blind pockets. The compactness of the “B” series mold base also makes it applicable whenever overall mold height must be limited in order to fit the tool in a given molding machine.
TOP CLAMPING PLATE
“A” PLATE
“B” PLATE SUPPORT PLATE
A-Series Mold Base Assembly The most frequently used standard assembly, the “A” Series Mold Base, is available in 43 sizes from 7 875 x 7 875 to 23 75 x 35 5
“Core and cavity inserts … have the most visible influence on the molded part yet … mold base selection should be considered critical to the profitability of the entire molding project.”
U.S. 800-626-6653 n Canada 800-387-6600 n dme.net n store.dme.net
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