I am sorry it has been a while since I updated. It is not because I have not been making progress. Quite the opposite. I have been making so much progress it is hard to stop and document it. But I will try my best to catch up. I was on my way home from work and thinking about another silicone mold which I made and how it didn't really work out. I decided that I would machine an aluminum mold for that project and it got me thinking about making a aluminum mold for this project.

The geometry for this project is much more complex than the other one, but might be within my abilities. If I were to machine my own aluminum mold I could add heaters into the mold. I was already planning on building a PID controller for my toaster over to turn it into a re-flow oven. Why not move those electronics into a separate unit that could PID control anything.

====Warning: This is where the project creep starts, I get lost in the design for a month ====

• If I had a PID control unit it could be used for many things and have many extra features. Not all of which need to be added at the start. With this PID unit and an aluminum mold I could inject the resin and cure it quite quickly inside the mold. This would lead to reduced cycle times.
• If I were able to machine the mold myself I could just machine a second or third mold to increase production. The PID control unit could easily control multiple devices at the same time. I could easily make system the could run multiple molds. This would allow me to scale my production rate with demand.
• If I machined the mold myself, I could change the tread profile by only modifying half of the mold. With that I could use the same system to make different tracks. Some for outdoors, some for wet and muddy situations, some road tracks. I designed the track system with this in mind. I even found an injection molding company that would make the mold with this in mind so that I could order a new mold half. But if I were able to make the mold then I could test out the track designs for much lower investment. Which means more opportunity to test new designs.
• If I could make the mold, then I could avoid having to jump to an injection molding company to get the product to market. I could start selling product immediately. My manufacturing costs would be slightly higher, but I would not have a huge initial investment to test the market. If the demand for my design ever goes up I can scale up my production with additional molds, and if it gets too high I can still go to injection molding but I would have a better understanding of my market.
• One thing I wanted to do with this project was offer different color options too. Black seemed like an obvious first choice but I thought it would be cool to have robots with different color tracks. Why limit yourself to black. But with injection molding that doesn't work out. There is a one time custom color mixing charge, a purge charge to switch out the colors and the per part cost would go up because the colored plastic costs more. There is also the problem of stocking many colors of product. Maybe I think purple, red and blue tracks are awesome. But what will I do with 10,000 of them sitting in my house if no one else does. But with this method I could make them to order with only a minimum increase to costs.

Base on all of that I decided to embark on creating my one injection molding capabilities to rival that of an injection molding company! The next several post document my process and success and failure....