Pressure Form Mold for Refrigerator Liners

A client with appliance manufacturing assets in both the United States and Mexico approached Borke Mold Specialists in regards to designing, casting, and assembling a plastic fridge liner for use within heavy machinery. After consulting the customer-supplied DWG 2D CAD files, and creating our own 3D models based off the supplied specs, we set about the involved processes of aluminum casting, CNC machining, and overall assembly.

We CNC machined foundry patterns for the mold and pressure box then had aluminum castings made for us to finish. By means of CNC machining programmed via MasterCam, we then machined the square core for the mold, the pushers in the pressure box and the 2 alignment pins. After tying all the air cylinders together into a common manifold this will allow the customer to control all the pushers with the vacuum forming machine. The mold surface was sanded to a 180 grit smooth finish and #78 vacuum holes drilled every 1.5″ apart. The mold included .005″ in per inch plastic shrink and produced a part with a tolerance of +/-1/32″.

The final part for the fridge liner component is 18.5″ x 17.5″ x 15.5″ in height. The mold and pressure box project was manufactured in 6 weeks time-frame and weighed over 1000#.