More than the temperature of the material, you should also care about the mould temperature. That allows for better flowability of the material

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If the scale between width and thickness of the plastic is too large and the shape of plastic is complex, the flowability of melt will be suffocated at the thin wall of the part so the short shot might form as a result.

What can you do?The temperature of the melt must be suitable and you can increase time of injection to improve this defect too. Make sure to consult the manufacturers datasheet on the minimum melt point of the plastic.

If the melt's temperature is insufficient, the material will not be able to go through all the injection process and will definitely cause a Short Shot.

The platen design allows for tools, guides, and ejector pin systems of all shapes and sizes to be used. This allows you to customize your tooling setup to meet the needs of your projects.

What can you do?You can preheat the mould to the temperature of process requirement before the injection machine starts; if the temperature of the mould can’t reach the target you should check in the cooling system.

Maybe you have experienced this issue before and might be asking yourself : "Why are my parts giving up halfway?" or "How could I avoid it?" This can be due to several reasons that we will outline here.

To solve this issue, you can either act on the material or on the injector. You can improve the placement of the runner, enlarge the gate or the size of the nozzles as a few examples. For the materials, you can also put some additional ingredients in the raw material to make its flowability better.

Each plastic injection molding machine has its own injection rate. It might happen that your machine's injection rate is too low regarding the mass of plastic needed.

After some uses, some residual materials might obstruct the runner and contribute to bad circulation of the material (as shown on the picture below).

We call this phenomenon a „short shot” due the fact that it is caused by the molding shot falling short of filling the mold. In other words, the melted plastic can’t manage to occupy all the space designed by the mold and creates an unfinished and deficient product.

Bo breaks down complex projects into turnkey-able parts. Educated in Optical Engineering, he is actually a veteran in plastic manufacturing.

In this case, the only solution is to change the equipment. It is highly recommended to choose an injection equipment that, at least, proposes an injection rate 15% more than the injection volume needed (for both plastic and condensed material).

Powered by a standard 120VAC or 220VAC outlet, the MicroMolder utilizes a multi-zone heated injector system to evenly heat thermoplastics to injectable temperatures.

Creating plastic casing using the injection molding process is more and more common during the development of a new product. However, a lot of quality issues might appear during the production process and might result in a loss of time and money. When dealing with plastic production, it's exceptionally important to understand what aspect of the production needs your attention and, most of all, how to deal with it. Today we will examine the short shot issues.

In order to resolve this issue, Disassemble the mold and injectors to clean the nozzles of any cold slug formations. A larger sized runner may also be needed

The MicroMolder and MicroMolder+ are fully automated small scale desktop injection molding machines.  They have been designed to help creators, makers, prototypers, artisans, small businesses, schools, and hobbyist produce functional plastic parts at volume in a fraction of the time compared to alternative tools and methods.  The MicroMolder lineup is the missing link when it comes to the affordable small-scale production of plastic parts.

Another cause for a short shot is when there isn't enough space for the gases in the mould to escape quickly enough to prevent bubbles or other abnormalities in the moulded part.

The mold filling speed is related to injection speed, if the mold filling speed is too low the temperature of the melt is reduced so that the flowability is affected where the product will suffer from this effect.

Reposition the vent to a suitable place and potentially increase the size of vent (We prefer depth 0.02-0.04mm, width 5-10mm).

In injection molding, the flowability of the used material might impact the result and the quality of your product. More flowable your material is, easier it will be injected. If your material is not flowable enough, you might experience a Short Shot.

Add colorant to compatible plastic resins to create infinite custom color blends for your parts.  Along with colorants, most injection molding compatible plastics can be used in MicroMolder.  General and engineering plastics such as Polyethylene, Polypropylene, ABS, Styrene, Polycarbonate, Polyoxymethylene, polyethylene terephthalate, and thermoplastic elastomers have been tested.

What can you do?According to our experience, the best thickness of plastic is around 1-3mm and the large plastic parts is 3-6mm. The thickness of plastic becomes challenged if the thicknesses are more than 8mm or less than 0.5mm, so it's best to stay within these tolerances.