SolidWorks Express | January 2007

Founded in 1971 by Ed and Charles Klouda, MSI Mold Builders provides high-quality, low-maintenance, efficient plastic molds.

Using a team-driven approach, the company develops its molds through creative engineering, state-of-the-art programming and CNC operations, all accomplished in an aggressive timeframe.

Today, MSI Mold Builders designs and builds various types of steel and aluminum molds for injection, structural foam, rim, blow, gas assist and structural web processes. They also provide aluminum limited production injection molds.The company serves a variety of industries including computers and business machines, medical diagnostics, material handling, sporting goods, lawn and garden, appliance, consumer electronics, heavy equipment and transportation.

Recently, SolidWorks Express interviewed mold engineering manager Kevin Kessinger about the company's use of MoldWorks, SplitWorks, and ElectrodeWorks.

What design challenge led you to choose R&B Ltd?

"We needed to reduce our design time and let our senior designers focus on the mechanics of a mold rather than the repetitive creation of standard mold components. The company evaluated several mold packages but chose MoldWorks, SplitWorks, and ElectrodeWorks from R&B."

How do you use these products in your design process?

"In the design concept phase we can rapidly create mold bases and place parts in the mold for steel size determination. Altering the mold base size is quick and very simple. Getting a mold design to full concept is very fast. Using SplitWorks to create cavity, core, and action faces speeds the split process. Then, using we use MoldWorks to quickly place Leader Pins, Bushings, Ejection, Cooling and Support. All components are placed into the design with all the clearance holes and plate cuts required for manufacturing. We customized this functionality to accommodate our feature recognition software."

What are the three main benefits of using these products?

Speed, Standard Compliance, and Ease of use.

How has using R&B products streamlined your design process?

"MoldWorks allows a designer follow a logical design process. The automatic creation of components and the corresponding plate geometry allows a designer to stay focused on the mechanics of the design rather than on routine parts creation. All of the components are available through one interface and libraries are organized into logical groups."

How has using R&B products reduced design time?

"Designing a concept more quickly allows for more in-depth 3D evaluation by our customer and manufacturing group. The sooner we gain our customer's approval the sooner we obtain buy-in from our manufacturing group, which means we can take the mold design to a finished state more quickly than ever before. Having more complete concept designs allows for more thorough review. Getting the design right the first time is always fastest but being able to rapidly change aspects of a design and update the mold is paramount to keeping design time at a minimum. Customer part design changes and internal requests for EC’s are very easy to handle. Designs and drawings update at once. Bills of Materials also update.

Explain why using R&B products reduced design errors and improved quality?

"We have design standards for nearly every component we design into a mold. We are free to customize any geometry MoldWorks creates when inserting components into a design. Once these parameters are set there is little chance for error. The component is inserted and the cut geometry is placed in every applicable plate or insert to the specification we preset. All of the components are parametric and update upon regen after editing. We have been able to customize the geometry creation to accommodate the requirements of our feature recognition software so now we place a component into a design and our CNC’s know what it is. Frankly it doesn’t matter if the detail gets noted on a drawing. If we place a water line in a design our CAM software determines from the geometry what operations to perform—the depth to drill, geometry to c’bore, and size to tap. Setting up the design tables, verifying the table information is all one must do to ensure correct geometry is being placed in a design for any MoldWorks component."

Interview with R&B customer: