Apply part shrinkage in Mastercam X

[nickelback]

How do you apply plastic part shrinkage in Mastercam X? I am designing the entire plastic injection mold in Mastercam X. This process is new to me.

 

What are the steps in spliting the core and cavity without having Moldplus? We are using Mastercam X only due to we don't have the money to spend on Moldplus at this time. I just need some direction on how to make the splits.

[g huns]

If your shrink is .020/in, just x-form-scale the part by 1.020. Old designer once told me, mold design is easy, everywhere there's plastic draw air, wherever there's air draw steel As for spliting, depending on complexity, just look at the part from the end and draw a 2d line or curves that will be parting line. Trim the surfs to the part line and you'll have your a and b sides.

[gavetta]

Ghuns got it covered for the shrink factor. I'd look into Moldplus if you are going to be doing lots of mold design and electrode cutting.

On a side note, I see your in Turtle Lake. I knew/worked for some folks from there. The company was Hartzell and they had a location down here in Florida for a while. We used Mastercam there too for design and programming. Sorry for the hi jack but just being friendly.

[within a thou]

my approach was a bit primitive but what I would do is change the level of all my cavity surfaces and use my level manager to make the core cavity seperation with file save some and creating seperate files

[Mjölnir]

quote:

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I am designing the entire plastic injection mold in Mastercam X.

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Egads! Why? I've been there and done that many times (only because that's the software I was provided with, definitly not by choice) and it never gets any less painful.

 

Pulling electrodes with Mastercam Solids is a snap, but designing anything beyond washer molds is simply a nightmare.

[Dave-Newcastle]

Ive been designing and making Injection mould tools for a long time now using mastercam and find it easy to do.

Shrink is as mentioned above.

Splitting is where you need to get creative and get your head around your model especially with out Moldplus.

First I orientate the model to acheive the line of draw that i want, change all colours the same, then put model into top view and start changing colours of all the surfaces that you can see in top view only, will call this cavity

Once you have done this either use alt-e to hide cavity surfs or change levels, you can then pick out other surfs that need to be on cavity side and change them also (vertical ones tec that you couldnt see in top view).

doing it this way seems a bit long winded but when youve done it a few times it aint bad.

when youve got your two halves "split" and in different colours you should be able to identify a parting line wich you can then tweak using surf trim options etc.

split line could be generated by fdrawing curves on edge of cavity and use squash function to move these curves out from cavity to edge of mould base, then just draw a ruled surf between the two.

hope this helps, definately worth investing in moldplus though!!!!