Mold Design and Casting > Using Mold Design and Casting > To Perform a Typical Mold Design Session
  
To Perform a Typical Mold Design Session
The Mold Design process may consist of the following steps:
1. Create a mold model. Assemble or create reference models and workpieces.
Or
Retrieve a mold model.
2. Perform a draft check on the reference model to determine if it has sufficient draft to be ejected from the mold cleanly. Define additional draft features in the design model or reference model as required.
3. Create shrinkage for your mold model. You can create isotropic scale shrinkage or shrink coefficients for some or all dimensions. You can apply shrinkage by dimension to your design model to leave the design model unchanged for use in other applications.
4. Define volumes or parting surfaces to split the workpiece into separate components.
5. Extract mold volumes to produce mold components. Once extracted, the mold components are fully functional parts, which you can open in Part mode, use in Drawings, machine with NC Manufacturing, and so on.
6. Add gates, runners, and waterlines as mold features. They will be considered when creating the molded part, as well as for interference checking during the mold opening process.
7. Fill the mold cavity to create the molding. The system creates the molding automatically by determining the volume remaining in the workpiece after subtracting the extracts.
8. Define steps for mold opening. Check interference with static parts for each step. Modify mold components if necessary.
9. Perform Mold Filling check using Plastic Adviser.
10. Estimate the preliminary size of the mold and select an appropriate mold base.
11. Assemble mold base components, if desired. The mold base components are the mold base parts (for example, top clamping plate, support plate, ejectors, and so on). The system displays them along with the mold model, and they are useful for visualizing the process of mold opening. With the optional LIBRARY module and the optional MOLD BASE library, you can view and assemble many standard mold fixtures.
12. Complete the detailed design, which includes laying out the ejection system, waterlines, and drawing.
13. Bring the mold components into NC Manufacturing for machining.
During the molding process, changes to the design model may occur. When these changes are made to the design model, they will propagate throughout all aspects of the design to engineering drawings, finite element models, assembly models, and molding information. Because the mold design engineer references the parametric design model directly, changes are reflected throughout all the intermediate process steps and captured in the molding model.