Corey Brain

I have spent twenty years sourcing injection molds and molded parts, working independently on the buyer's side of the table. Most of that work has meant placing tooling with mold makers and molders in China and elsewhere in Asia for buyers in North America and Europe, on automotive, consumer electronics, and home appliance programs. I write and review everything published on this site, and my name is on it so you know who to argue with.

What that experience actually covers

Sourcing a mold is not a purchasing transaction that ends at the PO. The part of the job that fills most of the calendar is everything after it: reviewing DFM feedback and pushing back on it, arguing about gate and parting line placement before steel is cut, following T0 and T1 trials, and deciding whether a sample and a tool are actually acceptable or just close enough that everyone wants to sign. Twenty years of that is where the material on this site comes from — the questions here are the ones that turned out to matter, usually because skipping one of them cost somebody a mold change.

What I am not: a molder, a mold maker, or a process engineer. I have not run a press or cut steel, and where this site describes what happens inside a shop it is reporting the trade's own standards and literature, not personal shop-floor practice.

How to read the numbers here

Where a figure comes from a published standard, a machine or resin manufacturer, or another checkable source, it is cited in the Sources and references section of that article. Where a guide describes a typical range or a common practice without a citation, it is written as orientation, not as a specification — including where it reflects my own experience, because one person's programs are not a standard. Confirm anything you are about to commit tooling on against your own part, resin, and supplier.

Disclosure

I continue to take mold sourcing work independently. You should know that when you read anything here, so here is where the line sits: this site is not that business. It does not broker projects, take RFQ submissions, accept referral fees or paid placement, run a supplier network, or recommend individual suppliers — and there is deliberately no path from these pages to hiring me. If a guide here ever reads like it is steering you toward a particular kind of supplier or a particular decision that happens to suit a sourcing agent, that is a fault worth writing to me about.

What "reviewed" means on an article

Before a guide carries the byline on this site, I check that:

• every number, range, or threshold is either cited to a checkable public source or written as a qualified generalization;
• no claim implies this site manufactures, brokers, vets, or guarantees anything;
• no supplier, price, lead time, or case study is asserted without a source;
• the guidance is framed as a decision a buyer has to make, with the trade-offs stated rather than a single "right" answer;
• the page says plainly when something depends on the part, the resin, the volume, or the supplier — because most of it does.

The full policy — how claims are sourced and cited, and what this site will not publish — is on the editorial standards page.

Corrections

If you work in molding or tooling and something here reads wrong to you, I want to hear it — that feedback is more useful than any traffic. Email [email protected] with the page and what you think is off. Substantive corrections are made in the article itself and the page's updated date is changed so the revision is visible.

Nothing on this site should be read as an endorsement of any company named in it, and it is not affiliated with any former Plastics Technology Alliance participant.