THIXOMOLDING: LIGHTWEIGHT, THIN-WALLED, STRONG METAL PARTS
Thixomolding is a unique manufacturing process that allows manufacturers to design highly complex, light weight parts from magnesium alloys for medium to high volume applications. It is not new process and has been used in the automotive, consumer products, drone, telecom, etc. industries for many years.
Thixomolding is high-pressure injection molding of a semi-molten magnesium alloy and MIM is a powdered/sintered metal process.
Thixomolding injects a magnesium alloy slurry at extremely high velocities into a mold that reduces voids. A properly designed part will have very high yields, excellent part detail, superb metallurgical structure, and tight tolerance capability when compared to magnesium die casting.
The concepts and theories behind designing parts for Thixomolding is more similar to plastic injection molding rather than die-casting. In fact, if you are familiar with plastic injection molding you are about 80% of the way to designing Thixomolded parts. We recommend that our customers design their parts for plastic injection molding and then let GTI help you optimize the final Thixomolding design for manufacturing.
Can You Machine Magnesium?
YES WE CAN!!
We machine it all of the time.
Whether 100% machining or machining of die-casting, we can do it. Many of our customers opt for machined prototypes to validate parts before approving thixomolding or die cast tooling.
Plus our magnesium machining operations are located in Puerto Rico or China depending on your requirements.