Quick Tip for Product Designers

Quick Tip for Product Designers -designing for plastic injection...
If you’re designing a plastic part that’ll be injection molded, here’s one thing that can save you a lot of time (and tooling cost):

Always design with draft — even if it’s just 0.5°.

A part with zero draft might look fine in CAD, but in the real world, it’ll fight the mold every time it’s ejected.

That means scuffing, sticking, or even cracking — and a frustrated toolmaker.

A few quick rules of thumb I follow:
0.5° – 1° for critical areas and features
1.5° – 2° for textured finishes and non critical features

Add draft early — it’s much easier to tweak features than to retrofit draft later.

Little details like this separate a “nice model” from a production-ready design — and it’s often where the real engineering happens.