Toy Production

1 0f 3 teammates, January - March 2023

Challenge

The best way to learn technical skills in Injection Molding and CNC machining is to get your hands dirty, so my Mechanical Engineering professor tasked teams of 3 to produce a plastic toy of our own design. The part must be composed of at least two-parts that fit together.

Skills

Technical: SolidWorks CAD modeling, cavity/core mold design, CNC machining, injection molding, tab fits

Outcome

The team and I took sketches and translated these all the way to an injection molded plastic toy! We produced 15+ unique toys.

Process Highlight

I particularly enjoyed this course because we were responsible for taking the idea all the way through production. This meant that we (1) sketched ideas on paper, (2) designed the parts on Solidworks, (3) used these designs to create cavities/cores of each part with runner and parting line considerations, (4) Machined the cavities and cores using the mill, and (5) used these molds to injection mold our final part. While I contributed to all stages, I personally led machining efforts using the mill and then produced many of the final parts with the injection molding machine. Completing the machining required familiarizing myself with the CNC mill, creating the pseudo code to be uploaded, selecting drill bit sizes for machining, and monitoring the machining path.

Project Learnings

About myself as an Engineer:

  • CAD is meticulous and early decisions in part design have large impacts on the outcomes of your vision.

  • I enjoyed taking personal ownership over the milling portion of the project, as it forced me to learn a new concept I wasn’t familiar with and the details that come with it (zeroing the machine, coding the process, drill bit selection, and more).

  • iteration is the cornerstone of perfection. The more iterations of the design we had, the more success we saw in the end.