LÓNG

Lóng was a project I completed for ME325, Injection Molding, and was designed with the Lunar New Year in mind. With such an important holiday in Chinese culture, I decided to create a dragon shaped keychain to help create a little bit of New Year festivity with the most iconic animal in Chinese mythology.

The parts are made from high density polyethylene (HDPE). The mold was machined using a Haas VF2 CNC mill from 6061 aluminum stock, and also features ejector pin features in order to aid in part removal and reduce cycle time.

My focus for this project was on learning how to fine tune injection molding parameters in order to maximize part quality and minimize cycle time, a goal that was successfully accomplished. Additionally, this project gave me my first experience working with very small CNC tooling, namely in the 1/32” and 1/64” range, which taught me a lot about the perks and hazards of using small tooling.