Plastic Part and Mold Design

Seminar Overview

Part and mold design is where most plastics failures are born — not in the press, not in the material, but in a decision made weeks before the first shot was ever packed. This core seminar is built from the industry's primary design references: the **Covestro Part and Mold Design Guide**, the resin-producer molding and design guides from **BASF (Ultramid processing and engineering properties)** and **DuPont (Delrin, Crastin, Zytel, and Minlon molding guides)**, the **Victrex PEEK injection and compression molding guides**, the **British Plastics Federation (BPF) design guides**, the **Parker O-Ring Handbook** where sealing interfaces meet part design, and the **Loctite Design Guide for Bonding Plastics** where assembly joins it — together with a dedicated process-science module drawn from the **RJG molding process science** corpus.

Day one covers the design methodology and the feature-level rules: nominal wall, draft, radii, ribs, bosses, and the shrinkage and tolerance consequences of every feature you add. Day two covers mold architecture from the part designer's seat: gate type and location, runner and sprue design, venting, and cooling — the decisions that set your cycle time, your weld lines, and your warpage for the life of the tool. Day three closes the loop with molding process science: how the four plastic variables (temperature, flow, pressure, cooling) actually behave in the cavity, how the process control sheet maps to part quality, and how a part designed without process awareness becomes a part that cannot be molded consistently.

The differentiator: this seminar is taught from PRIMARY SOURCE material — the actual resin-producer design guides, the BPF design guidance, and documented molding process records — not vendor slide decks. You leave able to review a part drawing and a mold design against the same criteria the resin producers and molders apply.

Ideal Learner

• Product and mechanical engineers designing injection-molded plastic parts
• Mold designers, tooling engineers, and mold-making project managers
• Plastics processing engineers and molding supervisors who must debug part quality at the press
• Manufacturing and DFM engineers reviewing supplier and internal designs for manufacturability
• Industry segments: automotive OEM/Tier 1, consumer products, medical devices, electronics enclosures, industrial equipment

Learning Objectives

• Apply a structured part design methodology — function first, material second, feature rules third — to a new or existing molded part
• Set draft angles, nominal wall thickness, radii, rib and boss geometry correctly for crystalline vs. amorphous resins, including glass-filled behavior
• Select and locate gate types, size runners and sprues, and predict where sink, weld lines, and warpage will appear on the part
• Design the cooling circuit consciously and explain how cooling strategy drives both cycle time and part distortion
• Assign achievable shrinkage-based tolerances (including glass-filled shrinkage ranges) and defend them against the tolerance stack
• Read and interrogate a molding process control sheet, connecting cavity pressure behavior to part defects
• Run a systematic DFM review that catches the classic failures — thick sections, sharp corners, undersized vents, impossible ejection — before steel is cut

Consulting Sessions

Seminar attendees can sign up for individual consulting sessions with the instructor. Sessions are free for registered attendees, first-come first-served — sign up when registering by calling 248-539-0473 or during the seminar.