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A tooling expert’s ‘primer’ on Metal Injection Moulding: What technology newcomers need to know Metal Injection Moulding often has an aura of mystery around it. Whilst those in the industry understand the technology well, there are many ‘on the outside’ who are more apprehensive. In this article, Declan Coyle takes some of the mystery out of MIM technology in relation to tooling. Having gone through his own ‘MIM initiation’ process when tasked with developing the tooling for Apple’s Lightning connector in 2011, Coyle is well-positioned to offer some practical ‘do and don’t’ suggestions from a tooling engineer’s perspective.
I have a small confession to make: I still have a copy of PIM International from December 2012. Why? Because this issue had the newly-unveiled Apple Lightning connector on the front cover. And that little connector owned most of my life for a solid eighteen months. It was my introduction to Metal Injection Moulding, the application which taught me about MIM from the bottom up. A true baptism of fire. I’ll give a little more background to my introduction to the technology back in 2011: I was a new tooling engineer at Apple. My history included a mix of manufacturing experiences that helped me get involved in a variety of tooling flavours. I was eager to learn and grow, so I volunteered for the offbeat stuff as much as possible. One day, my boss approached my desk and asked me to join him for a five minute catch-up. At the end, he said, “Oh yeah, that reminds me. We have a MIM part coming that may interest you. Sound good? Away you go, have fun, figure it out, and help make this happen.”
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And that’s how I got the chance to dive into the deep end of Metal Injection Moulding: on an application that ended up with a production run of billions and, in the process, reshaped an industry.
Building the building blocks You may be wondering how I approached this mammoth task. What did I do to start my MIM
Fig. 1 The December 2012 issue of PIM International with Apple’s MIM Lightning connector on the cover
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