Work is being done at Advantage Mold, a tool & die shop in Toledo, Ohio, which normally specializes in making molds for plastic parts on automobiles: things like tail light lenses, heater ducts, fan shrouds, etc. Advantage Mold's chief designer, Keith Julius, has been designing molds for more than 20 years. One advantage of working with Keith to design the car is that he spots things which will make the part hard to mold, allowing us to change it immediately saving time and money. The machinist working on our molds, Todd, has been making molds for over 15 years.

Here are two C.A.D. drawings of our chassis mold. If this looks complicated, it is, even though Keith and Todd both say that, as molds go, this is of medium difficulty. In fact, they're working on a mold to make four heater duct doors at once which makes our mold look simple.

If you look carefully, you'll see the chassis, nose piece, and shock tower in the mold. The bulk of the lines you see in the wire frame are core pins and ejector pins. Every place where there needs to be an hole in the plastic (where bolts or ball studs go) must have a "core pin." This is a pin that goes through the ejector side of the mold and engages into the cover side, allowing the molten plastic to flow around it, thus leaving an hole where the pin is.

A mold is made of two main parts: the cover and the ejector. An hydraulic press pushes the two together (They must mate perfectly.) and molten plastic is injected. After a few seconds for cooling, the press pulls the two halves of the mold apart, and usually the now-finished plastic part sticks to the ejector side of the mold. "Ejector pins" run through the ejector side which push the part out of the mold. When you see small round indentations on one side of a part, that's where the ejector pins have pushed.

We've actually molded bosses into parts of the X-5 and X-6 chassies so the pins can get a better surface to push on the part. They don't push well on a curved surface. So there are lots more lines on the wire frame for the ejector pins.

Here's a shot of the control panel. Todd says this panel is much more complicated than those he's used to. It takes much more time to program this machine, but the machine works much faster than older ones and does better work too, with better curves and fewer machine marks, so the extra time programming is more than made up.

Finally, here's a photo of one side of our chassis mold. The cavities for the parts are done, but the holes for the core pins and ejector pins must be added.