1. 3D Design

2. Creating the molds

3. Testing and tweaking the molds

4. Creating the material surface

5. Plastic injection!

6. Special treatment afterwards

The first thing is the 3D design. CAD. That's the 3D model where we got the renderings from.Then you need to turn these models into molds. And THAT'S a very tricky part.If you think it's comparable to 3D printing: Nope, it isn't. Totally different.A mold is basically like a box:You close it and pump hot plastic into it. It then cools off and gets hard. Then your plastic part is done.So theof the plastic part, enclosed in two metal parts.No problem for simple parts (like the LCD frame of the lid). It getsthough, like the keyboard part of the case: There are holes in the area where the hinge is. Holes inverted mean: The Metal needs to float in the air! You cannot create such a complex part with fine details (metal still needs to be CNC-milled, after all), so you need to createWith complex parts, the mold is a bit like a puzzle, with various inlays to create the inside-holes and special shapes.That's also needed for the clips of the battery lid, for example.You can see the cut metal where the additional tools for creating the clips will be put in on this photo:When 3D printing, you have your 3D data in the computer and tell it to print it out.With mold creation, you need to first think how to achieve what you need and then create the molds including various additional tools with a CNC mill.However,CNC milling the steel molds is not accurate enough for fine details like the grid for the keyboard part.You need to create ANOTHER tool to do slow, and slowly cut them directly into the hot steel (with permanent oil cooling).You can see that in the picture here (and also in the video below):In the end, however, you will have nice, clean and perfect steel mold that can be used for about 1 Million cases...Now I can totally understand why mold production is very cheap in China, but very expensive in most parts of Europe: It's a LOT of labour work - and wages are usually very high in Europe.A full case set like the one from the Pyra takes a couple of months until it's finished.Creating the molds is already a complex thing, but it doesn't automatically mean they will be perfect right away.Similar to tweaking the machine file and PCB layout for pick & place mass production (which is what we did the pre-production run at Global Components for), you also need to test and tweak the molds.Producing plastic works like this:Melted plastic is pumped into the mold and there it cools off. The important thing is that itOtherwise,Color differences, areas where it automatically can develop cracks after a while (remember the Pandora?) shrinking marks or slightly bent parts.Imagine, for example, that you have a huge peg in the case. If that one cools off faster than the ground plane, then the weight pushes it down and affects the still melted plastic - that's something that can be seen on many cheap plastic parts.Also, when cooling off, the plastic can also shrink a bit, so the size is a tiny bit different than in your model.This is also something you need to test and then fix in the mold.I am almost sure that was the problem with the LCD frame of the Pandora, the reason why the lower side has such a gap: The outer link shrank a bit and hasn't been tweaked, therefore the frame is being pushed together from both sides resulting in the gap.While the mold flow can be simulated to some extents, it's nigh impossible to accurately simulate it.So you need(to choose the correct places to inject the plastic before creating the mold) and need to, doing small tweaks to the molds or the machine program (you can change the pressure and heat for the plastic injection, which also improves things).After everything has been tweaked so that the molds are basically ready to produce the plastic parts, you shouldto the mold.Otherwise, the plastic will simply look plain and glossy (and totally ugly), and it easily receives scratches.By applying material surface, you canon the plastic that makes it look matte and it even covers smaller issues (small shrinking marks you can't prevent).We will use aHere is a mold which already has the material surface applied:You get this effect by eroding the mold. The finer you want it, the longer it takes. That part needed about 30 hours, just for the material surface!Finally, once the molds are finished, theThat's pretty straightforward (as it usually is when you do mass production, mass production has to be well prepared, simple and reliable to prevent huge failures).The plastic we use is a(the same one you can see in the video below) and by adding some pulverized color, you create the color you want.Once the molds are finished, thousands of case sets can easily be produced within a few days.Except you want...Some things like acan directly be applied at FormAction (so that won't need much more), but some effects are being done with a partner company, for example, textures on the case like these:Yes, we will produce some units looking like these - but those will be, as it add approximately 30 EUR to production costs on top!It's cool seeing what's possible though!So much for our small introduction to mold injection... let's continue with our plans.