Racking up ribs: General Industry Coverage

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END USER: Prospect Mold Inc., (330) 929-3311, prospectmold.com. CHALLENGE: Reduce the time needed to cut grooves in a large mold. SOLUTION: Replace EDMing with endmilling. SOLUTION PROVIDER: OSG Tap & Die Inc., www.osgtool.com, (800) 837-2223

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Prospect Mold Inc., Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, makes compression and injection molds, dies, fixtures and jigs.

Moldmaking is one of the industries most acutely affected by offshore competition. “We are definitely competing in a global market,” said Duane Shroyer, the company’s vice president of manufacturing. “We have to do what we can to stay competitive.”

In machining a mold for a truck’s interior panel, Prospect Mold applied advanced tools to maximize its competitiveness. The P-20 steel mold was about 80 ” long × 45 ” wide, and the mold cavity required metal removal to a depth of about 4 “. In addition to other contours and details, the cavity was crisscrossed with more than 750 linear inches of 0.090 “- to 0.100 “-wide × 0.400 “- to 0.900 “-deep grooves to create reinforcing ribs on the back of the molded plastic part. The groove sidewalls featured 2° of draft, or inclination, to allow the panel to release from the mold.

Courtesy of OSG

Prospect Mold replaced a three-step EDM process with one machining operation using rib-cutting endmills from OSG Tap & Die and reduced the time needed to machine narrow grooves in a large mold.

Prospect Mold roughed the cavity with indexable round inserts on an FPT Raid vertical machining center. The majority of the mold details were then cut with solid-carbide cutting tools as small as 1⁄8 ” in diameter. Those initial machining operations consumed about 180 hours.