To Protomold, Or Not To Protomold, That is The Question

Joseph Flaherty had an article in WIRED today about affordable injection molding and how it's making the cost of tooling for mass production a smaller financial hindrance. Protomold was featured in the article and we've worked with them and Quickparts on other projects, but for the Cookie Dunking Cup, we decided that quick turn services weren't for us.

First of all, we think that Protomold and Quickparts are awesome. (We've worked with both of them in the past, too!) It can easily cost over $100K to design and build a multi-cavity steel mold that's expected to produce millions of parts, but if you only want to make a few thousand, it's not the way to go. Protomold and Quickparts excel at making cheap, quick turn, single cavity aluminum molds, that lean, bootstrapped, entrepreneurial hardware makers need.

So why didn't we use them? It turns out, we were starting to bump into the technical limitations of what Protomold could offer. Our Cookie Cup has some serious undercuts, or features that would cause a normal two part mold to rip through the part when the mold opens. The undercuts are handled with a more complicated mold piece called a "side action" and the depth of draw was outside what Protomold could offer without compromising our design.

We spent a lot of time finding a local manufacturer because they could handle the technical requirements and if we get lucky enough to want to invest in the steel, multi-cavity mold, they'd be ready for us. We think Protomold is an awesome service, it just wasn't right for this project.