new bead mold

Our new large bead mold comes with fancy laser marking!

It's always exciting when we get a new mold in the shop, even if the product isn't terribly different. This one is a large bead mold for craft projects. It's pretty much identical to our previous bead mold, it just makes larger beads. It is a little easier to use than the small bead mold, since there's a touch more room for the plastic to flow. We managed to get several fully-filled rings of beads on the first day, with no short shots. This wasn't the case when we tried our small bead mold, which has to be pre-heated... otherwise the plastic will solidify halfway through the injection process. We still get useable beads when this happens, but we don't get as many. We learned that when these molds are preheated (about ten minutes at 250 degrees F usually does the trick) and lubricated with a quick shot of silicone spray, they work like a charm. We followed this process with the new bead mold right from the start, and had no problems.

These molds use such a small amount of plastic, they can be used pretty much continuously. In other words, you can inject the mold, add a little flake to the injector, and then remove the product. By the time we get the product out of the mold and tighten the bolts, the injector is ready to go... no need to wait for the plastic to melt. What this means is that we can really crank out the beads. This is a good thing, because beads are a fairly low-cost item and we can't ask a whole lot for them. So the quicker we can make them, the better.

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Very similar design to our small bead mold, but the larger size makes this easier to use