3 ms·
>Its been mainly small tractor attachments/brackets/etc. You're going to have to be specific as it is entirely up to what you are manufacturing. How tight are
by Aromasin 5y ago
>Its been mainly small tractor attachments/brackets/etc.
You're going to have to be specific as it is entirely up to what you are manufacturing. How tight are your tolerances? Is it plastics? Metals? By small scale do you mean a batch of 10, 100, 1k, 10k?
There are first class machinists on YouTube that will teach for free and to be frank, I've yet to run into anything that couldn't be machined with a bit of skill, a lathe, a drill press, and a milling machine, all of which you can pick up on the cheap. I'd start there. What about it makes you need to use injection molding? That's a process used in bulk production. If it's tractor brackets and such then casting might be a better idea. If you're looking into injection molding, you'll have to get in contact with professionals - the tooling is in the range of hundreds of thousands if not millions. The "next level" of prototyping for you I think would be machining, not IM. You might be able to pay a contractor to do IM for you but it'd be a stretch at your budget.
On a tangential note, I'm currently working my way through MIT's "Principles of Manufacturing" MicroMasters program on edx and would thoroughly recommend it. It's more large scale systems then anything, but it's been great for me in terms of learning the vernacular and has helped me better communicate with manufacturers when I'm looking to scale one of my designs. Might be worth checking out.
https://courses.edx.org/dashboard/programs/452d5bbb-00a4-4cc9-99d7-d7dd43c2bece/ https://courses.edx.org/dashboard/programs/452d5bbb-00a4-4cc...