Breaking down the benefits of family and multi-cavity tooling

Can your project benefit from multi-cavity or family tooling?

Injection molding fluoropolymers can be a very challenging process due to the nature of the polymers themselves. For one – fluoropolymers have extremely high melting points and produce corrosive HF gas when molten. High shrink rates also add to the challenges.

All these properties require the use of specialized tool materials and tool design, along with deep expertise in handling these materials.

Savillex has been molding fluoropolymers since 1976 and understands how to handle these difficult materials – even at high production volumes, using both multi-cavity tooling and family tooling.

Depending on the overall annual part quantities – or sometimes the target piece part pricing required – the use of multi-cavity tooling or family tooling processes, despite the higher initial investment, can be cost effective for long term production.

Breaking down the use cases and benefits

For projects with multiple parts similar in geometry or size, and where relatively low annual quantities are needed, family tooling may be a good solution.

The family tooling process allows for lower initial capital investment. How? Rather than going the “traditional” route of creating an individual mold for each part number, family tooling uses a single tool to create several different parts with minimal or no change to the tool between runs.

Family tooling could also create added efficiency when molding as it’s sometimes possible to run more than one part number at a time. This helps drive the piece part cost down.

For projects with very high annual requirements, multi-cavity tooling is a better solution as it allows for several identical parts to be made with every cycle of our injection molding equipment.

This increase in efficiency is directly related to decreased cost per every individual part. And while there is usually a higher initial cost for multi-cavity tooling, that initial investment can quickly be offset by lower piece part costs that save money and reduce part delivery lead times over the long run.

Of course, depending on the project – the payback timing for both options over a traditional single cavity mold is going to vary. Contact Savillex to discuss the best options for your specific requirements and check out our full set of tooling capabilities.