Mold area without draft angle 1

[lucky-guesser]

I'm not totally new to working with molds, but I don't have a ton of experience either, so this is definitely a new one for me.

Imagine your dogs food bowl, except it's 36" wide, has dividers in it and is made for cows. We currently have one model that has a divider straight down the middle cutting it in half, and another with a "Y" divider cutting it into 3 equal sections. Our molds are getting pretty old so while we are rebuilding the molds we figured we might as well do a redesign of the part as well. One of the current ideas is to mold the bowl as a stand alone piece, then have the dividers either be molded or formed out of stainless separately and let the customer decide which, if an divider they want to use. The idea is to mold T-slots into the bowl walls, but for the dividers to be inserted, in my mind these molded slots would have to be perfectly straight with no draft angle. This definitely doesn't work for the body of the part but I was wondering if you guys thought we could get away with no draft just in these slots.

Material is virgin polyethylene, 1% shrink factor.

 

[3DDave]

How does the mold release T-slots?

Is this for one of those timed feeding bowls where a mooooving cover exposes one section at time? (Sorry - I had to work that in.)

 

[ctopher]

Does it have to be slotted? Why not threaded inserts? This way you can mold undersize holes, then install inserts.

Chris, CSWP
SolidWorks
ctophers home

 

[MintJulep]

The slots will collect crap, be places for bacteria and fungi to grow and be hard to clean.

Your customers will hate it.

 

[lucky-guesser]

Does it have to be slotted? Why not threaded inserts? This way you can mold undersize holes, then install inserts.

No it doesn't, its just one of the options. Right now I'm just trying to decide if it could work or if I should throw it out entirely. I would doubt the others would want to mold in inserts, right now it is all one piece and adding one piece is already going to be more complicated than some of the others will like, having to add inserts and bolts won't go over well I'm sure.

The slots will collect crap, be places for bacteria and fungi to grow and be hard to clean.

Your customers will hate it.

I hadn't thought about it from a sanitation aspect but I had some about debris getting in the way of the molded piece being able to slide in though. If you have the insert in to begin with I would think it would be fine but yes, if the insert is out or not set correctly then I can definitely see stuff getting in there and causing issues.