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MMS FEBRUARY 2018 66 mmsonline.com EDM TECHNOLOGY Moving Past Micro-EDM Boundaries To push past the limits of conventional EDM equipment, this German injection molding company adopted atypical micro-EDM "milling" technology to machine small molds for tiny, critical, injection-molded parts. PKT Präzisions-Kunststoff-Teile, based in Tiefenbronn, Germany, starts where some manufacturers stop. The medium-sized company with some 120 employees specializes in injection molding of small, precision components weighing from 0.002 to 30 grams for customers in the precision engineering, medical, automotive, electronics and watch-making industries. In order to meet its customers' high demands for quality, the company manufactures its molds in house. However, producing plastic parts at such a small scale is not without big metal-machining challenges. With customers demanding ever smaller com- ponents and increasingly finer contour details, the company's existing machining technologies BY BARBARA SCHULZ | EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENT This mold insert is made from a tungsten carbide block by micro-EDM technology. The mold is used to produce a micro-gear wheel of polyamide PA12 with two sprockets. Photo: Klaus Vollrath