Engineering and Design for Manufacturability (DFM)

Experience Counts

Our reputation for high quality stems from our experienced design staff. The foundation is set by our design engineers who average nearly 30 years of experience designing plastic injection molds for a wide variety of challenging parts.

From the very beginning, our plastic injection molds are designed with an emphasis on efficiency and functionality, leading to time savings in production, longer-lasting tools, and fewer modifications.

Design for Manufacturability

Matrix Plastic Products is committed to providing superior part design consultation, mold design and engineering services. Design for manufacturability and efficient production is our primary objective. Early involvement and working closely with customer engineering departments provides a smooth transition from part design to final product.

Our Engineers can receive you part design data in a variety of 3D formats:

• Siemens NX (.prt)
• SolidWorks (.sldprt /.slddrw)
• Parasolid (.x_t)
• STEP 203/214 (.stp /.step)
• IGES (.igs /.iges)

Engineering Software

^{SolidWorks® Plastics Premium Advanced Flow Simulation}

SolidWorks® Plastics Premium is plastic injection molding simulation software that allows part and mold designers to optimize their designs during the initial stages of development. Our engineers use it early in the mold design process to address any potential areas of concern regarding a customer’s part data (such as wall thickness, gate location, fill and cycle time, temperature, and consistency.)  This ensures the most efficient use of time and resources, as it is significantly less costly to make part design changes prior to any actual prototyping or machining activities.

SolidWorks^® Premium and Siemens NX^®

Our integrated CAD/CAM system features the latest version of SolidWorks® and Siemens NX® (formerly Unigraphics) software. Every one of our molds is designed in 3D solids, creating a complete digital representation for manufacturing. This ensures proper integration of all components and makes paperless mold design and manufacturing possible. Our network of 14 workstations throughout our facility makes the read-only 3D master data accessible at every stage of the project lifecycle. Our moldmakers are able to access the master model, interrogate it for dimensions, and begin the mold manufacturing process almost immediately, which is beneficial in meeting our customers’ compressed lead times. During qualification and throughout production, our quality assurance department will also access this data to compare physical part inspection results against the reference design.

3D Printing & Prototyping

Our experienced team of design engineers combine technical expertise, technology and a creative approach to provide a variety of intermediate steps to get you from an initial concept into production faster. With our 3D Systems® ProJet MJP 2500 3D printer, we have the ability to produce functional plastic prototype parts directly from a 3D model in less than 24 hours. Depending on the application, the resulting prototype parts can demonstrate basic functionality and testing for design verification and marketing approval, prior to any investment in tooling.

3D printing allows us to experiment with ideas about ways to make things better, faster and more economically. We use it to design and produce virtually all of our inspection fixtures, and have even injection molded sample parts using 3D printed cores and cavities.

At the next stage of product development, our "development tooling" is perfectly suited to complex applications in the trial stage.

Tom Ziegenhorn, Design Engineer

"Listening carefully to our customers to gain a complete understanding of their goals – and keeping those goals in sight at all times – is really the key to successful R&D. Applying our technical experience to make those goals a reality is very rewarding."  – Tom Ziegenhorn