> I am becoming a bit more adventurous with my designs, and have started designing some ideas that would need to be injection moulded to be of any real practica

> I am becoming a bit more adventurous with my designs, and have started designing some ideas that would need to be injection moulded to be of any real practical use. Your wording here is a bit odd. Injection moulding is mostly a question of scale. Do you need to mass-produce your parts or are you just looking for mechanical properties that a standard 3D printer can't provide? If it's mechanical properties, there may be other options like resin printing, casting or machining parts. > How can I move to this "next level" of prototyping and small scale manufacture? Is this something I can achieve myself with (limited) investment in specific machinery (budget ~15k USD)? You can get a (very) low end injection moulding machine for a bit over $2000 [0] and you can get a small desktop CNC milling machine for just under $3000 [1]. I would think about going for something more like a Tormach or SYIL but those are more like $10000. You might also find Physics Anonymous' videos interesting. They bought a small injection moulding machine for a small run [2]. But there's going to be a huge learning curve here. Moulds are much more complicated mechanisms than static welded parts. Before you get too invested in injection moulding, I'd really spend some time to see if you can manufacture the part some other way. Maybe talk to a job shop and ask them if they think they can fabricate it. [0]: https://www.techkits.com/products/model-150a/ https://www.techkits.com/products/model-150a/ [1]: https://shop.carbide3d.com/products/nomad-3/nomad-3?variant=32912906354749 https://shop.carbide3d.com/products/nomad-3/nomad-3?variant=... [2]: https://youtu.be/n7JWPxk92fY https://youtu.be/n7JWPxk92fY