Short-Run Injection Molding for Dental Devices

Short-run molding for dental medical devices

These dental mouthpieces are molded in TPE, a soft thermoplastic elastomer that is comfortable in the mouth and easy to clean. The customer, a medical device manufacturer, needed a few thousand parts per year, so the challenge was to keep tooling and part cost under control without giving up the consistency a medical part requires.

Tooling for a soft, medical part

• Two cavities in AISI 420 stainless steel, which resists corrosion and polishes well for a smooth mouth-contact surface.
• DME / Euro standard mold base and components.
• Cold runner sized to fill thin flexible sections without flash, since TPE flows easily and flashes at the smallest gap.
• Ejection designed for a soft part: wide ejector areas and air assistance so the mouthpiece is not stretched or marked.

Process control instead of rework

In short runs there is no time to tune a process over weeks of production. We fix the melt temperature, injection pressure and cooling time during the T1 trial, measure the parts dimension by dimension and record the settings. Every later batch is started from the same validated parameters, so parts stay consistent from run to run.

Mold maintenance is planned as part of the cost: a clean, well-kept short-run mold keeps producing good parts without expensive repairs.

How a project like this works

• Tell us what you need – the mold only, molded parts, or both, and your estimated annual volume.
• Send drawings – STEP, IGES, STL, DWG or PDF, or a sample. We sign off moldability in a DFM review.
• Quotation – tooling price, part price and a schedule, with steel, cavities and runner proposed.
• Mold design approval – you approve the 3D mold design before steel is cut.
• T1 samples + FAI report – production or mold shipment starts after your approval.

Shipping molds and parts

• Molds are cleaned, rust-protected, marked and checked against a shipment checklist: cooling circuits, sprue, locating ring, ejection and support pillars.
• Molds ship with drawings, a spare-parts list and the T1 process sheet.
• Parts are packed to your packing instruction and inspected before shipment.
• We ship to customers in Europe, the USA and Asia.

After-sales

Our after-sales team supports mold maintenance and modifications remotely and can supply spare inserts. Contact [email protected].