Customer Reviews

Secrets of Building a Plastic Injection Molding Machine

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Gingery books are always good do it your self books. Of course you needs tools as you would to build any machine. Small injection molding machines go for about $1000. To build one you will have to buy some stuff like the heating cartridges and steel for the parts. Half the fun of a Gingery book is actually building the machines. So for a $100 in supplies and a day to a week making and assembling the parts you will have a working machine. Also Gingery books are easy to read and understand.

A quick read and definitely enjoyable in knowing how "possible" it is to make your own 1/2 oz. injection molding machine. Only major problem... You need a few tools; probably a bandsaw, welding equipment, a good drill press and most likely a lathe. But then again, if you want to make some molds for the IM machine you probably already have the tools I listed! The point is, it's a good learning project, but you're better off buying your own small IM machine for a few hundred bucks...

at 120+ pages, Secrets of building a plastic injection molding machine, is a pretty quick read. I haven't gotten around to trying to build such a device yet, cause honestly I've never built anything before..

a few words though. The deivce once built works with strips of plastics you've collected from old recyclables around the house.. soda bottles, etc.. which is pretty cool.

the machine itself however consists of about 6 pages, of which 80 % is screws and bolts and washers.. The back of the books has a very small list of possible suppliers for some of the more unique parts, and it looks like the machine itself will take abour roughly 100 bucks to make, give or take a little.

So if you've already built a few things then by all means this is gonna be a good time for you, to expand what you can do.

if you haven't touched a screw driver lately, you might want to start somewhere else...

This book is great for someone who is interested in casting plastics and wants to get some basic experience without buying thousands of dollars worth of machinery. It is written well with lots of hints on how to keep the cost down as well as things he tried that didn't work out so that you don't make the same mistakes.

The book is a well constructed account of how to build a bottom-rung plastic injector, and may be useful to anyone who wants to understand the workings of such a thing from a hands-on perspective. But I must agree with another reviewer that the device appears to have no practical value at all. What items can you really make with a device that takes appreciable effort and cost to build, and can't produce anything that weighs more than half an ounce? The only example the author has provided is to make a control knob for the machine's height adjustment. Perhaps anyone who has built this device and found it worthwhile could provide their own comments to counter this, but until then, I can only recommend the book as a quick ground-level read on injector background.

For as interesting as the promo describes this book, it is a very nothing book. You soon realize that the device the author built has absolutely no practical purpose other than to form the basis for the book.

This book is a good basic book on plastic molding
but has nothing about the use of magna plastics and polymer films
in casting or injection molding.