The Traps are nearly ready! We just returned this past weekend from China where we visited our manufacturer to see the first fly traps produced.
There were many reasons we (Joylyn and I and our 3 year old son, Dakota) had for making a trip to China. The first and foremost being to ensure the recently completed molds were producing the right components and that the components fit together as they were designed.
For those who aren’t familiar with how injection molding works let us share with you what we’ve learned. Injection molding starts with the creation of a steel mold. Molds are carved out with mills and lathes to create a cavity representing your product drawn initially in Solidworks, a 3-D cad software. It typically takes 2 months to create a mold with this process.
Once the mold is ready, plastic pellets are heated into a liquid and forced into the mold cavity where the plastic is pressed into a shape then rapidly cooled. When the mold separates, your pieces fall out (hopefully). The molds are very expensive, typically tens of thousands of dollars, but once the mold is made, each individual piece can be injection molded very quickly and relatively inexpensively. Yes - all those millions and millions of plastic pieces you see on store shelves everywhere are for the most part, manufactured in China using this process. The mold below is 1/2 of 1 mold used to manufacture the Garbage Can Fly Trap. There are 5 molds total.
OK – back to the fly trap… After a tour of the manufacturing facility, we were very happy to see pieces of the Garbage Can Fly Trap coming out of the molds (there are 5 molds all together) at a rate of 4 - 8 pieces per minute depending on the mold and extremely pleased to see the pieces snap together as they were designed! I guess all those late, late nights designing and redesigning were worth it! This extra attention to detail in the design process in the months of November – February delayed us but are now paying off in production.
Some small changes were decided upon and implemented while we were there. We were very impressed with their professionalism and work ethic. They have been in business for 35 years and manufacture beauty products (hair dryers, hair straighteners, etc.) - all injection molded.
We brought back several production samples for further testing. The morning after we returned we installed a Garbage Can Fly Trap in our curbside garbage can. After 2 days, we caught 12 house flies and 13 fruit flies! It’s not even fly season.
Prior to our trip to China we redesigned our logo. We’re looking to name our fly guy. Go here to vote: https://www.facebook.com/Garbage-Can-Fly-Trap-1558734281038786/?pnref=story
We also designed our packaging. Hope you like it!
We are well on our way to bringing the Garbage Can Fly Trap to market.
Dennis and Joylyn
