LED Lighting molding Introduction

During the communication with many clients, they always want to some special products for themselves not show on the market or different with the product of their competitors. But the factories not can always produce the special products, that because for most lighting fixtures,need molding to make mass production.

Usually there are four kind of tooling for the lighting fixture: Die casting molding, extrusion molding,forging and pressing molding,spinning die,injection molding. For the lighting fixture, die casting, extrusion tooling, injection tooling are the most commonly used.

In this article,i will introduce the three molding usage and the rough cost for these tooling.

1. The die casting tooling,the usage for the die casting is very popular, even every kinds of lighting fixture will use the die casting tooling. These lighting parts which with un-regular shape,with bulges,steps,poles,complicated structures need use die casting tooling. The spare parts of the lighting fixture usually is zinc alloy or the aluminium alloy. Like the below picture:

For this driver box, why can not use the extrusion molding, because it is round plus square shape,the extrusion molding can only make one shape,round or square.

What about the cost for the die casting molding? Usually it depends on two things, the lighting spare parts dimension and size,how many pcs per injection. Usually for the big lighting spare parts,like the big power track light,down light, street light, bollard light, one injection only one pcs. The small lighting fixture, like the small spotlight fixture,below 10w, one injection usually will choose 4-6pcs, because if one injection only one pcs,the unit price will be much higher.Although the molding cost for 1 injection 1 pcs will be much cheaper than the molding cost for 1 injection 4-6pcs. But compare to the molding cost, the unit price is much important for these small lights.

Tooling cost introduce:

Small spot light like below front ring: 1 injection 1pcs will be around 1300USD, 1 injection 6pcs need around 3000USD.	Track light heatsink as below pictures(30-40w),molding cost will be around 8000USD,the front ring of the heatsink molding cost will be around 4600USD.
The below driver box molding cost for the track light,molding cost is around 5000USD.	Usually the most expensive mold tooling is the street light. The mold tooling will be from 15000USD to more than 100000USD.
The Bollard light usually not need all die casting tooling, combine the extrusion and the die casting tooling together.The below light only the front cover and the back base need die casting tooling, the middle lampbody is use extrusion tooling.The base molding cost is around 6000USD,the cover molding cost is around 4000USD.

2. Extrusion molding

The extrusion molding is also very common used in lighting field.These round,square shapes,usually can make for lampbody,driver box,heatsink,especially use a lot in linear light.The extrusion tooling cost is much cheaper compare to die casting tooling.The extrusion molding cost is from around 300usd to around 1000USD according to the dimension of product.

Extrusion Heatsink	Extrusion driver box
Extrusion lampbody	Linear light lampbody

3. Injection molding

Usually the injection molding used for these plastic spare parts of the lighting fixture,like the front ring, the back cover,the plastic driver box.The tooling cost from 2000USD to around 5000USD according to the spare parts dimension.

Injection plastic driver box	Injection plastic back cover
Injection plastic front ring

4. Forging and pressing molding

The forging and pressing molding is usually for the heatsink,