Choosing the Right Injection Molding Tooling Material for your project

There are multiple commonly used grades of metals for tooling, and they’re typically used for the different stages of product development and validation. These different types of materials produce molds that provide assorted achievable tooling lead times and costs, different plastic part cycle times and associated unit costs, and varying levels of dimensional part precision and cosmetic quality of appearance. 



SuNPe provides soft tooling and production tooling.

Aluminum, P20 and 718H Steel is a material commonly used for soft tooling, we can finish it in 1-2 weeks. The tooling life can be 10K-30K shots, or more.
Soft tooling can be machined more than twice as fast as production tooling, and It also doesn’t require post heat treatment. These two factors greatly shorten lead times and cost as compared to production tooling.  
They have excellent heat transfer properties, which enables heating and cooling of the tooling more easily. In some situations, the part cycle time can be faster than with production tooling because of these properties.

S136H Steel is commonly used for production tooling, It strikes a strong balance between cost, available tooling lead time, part quality and dimensional part stability. So the costs will higher than soft tooling. Their processing time is 2-4 weeks, and we will evaluate based on the specific part structure. The tooling life is 300K-800K shots, depending on the plastic material and part design. 

Please contact us if you have any mold injection project, we’ll find the solutions that meet your needs.

#injection molding #tooling #plastic #steel # Aluminum