Editorial Standards and Sourcing Policy

Injection molding advice is easy to write and hard to trust. Numbers get copied between websites until nobody can say where they came from, and a range that was true for one resin on one part becomes a universal rule. This page sets out what this site does about that, so you can judge how much weight to put on any given page here.

Who reviews the content

Every guide is written and reviewed by Corey Brain, the editor of this site, and carries a visible byline and a last-updated date. The background behind that byline is twenty years of buyer-side mold sourcing — placing tooling with mold makers and molders in China and elsewhere in Asia for buyers in North America and Europe, through DFM review, mold trials, and tool and sample acceptance.

That experience is buying and qualifying tooling, not making it. This site is not a molder or a mold shop and does not claim process or mold making practice; where it describes what happens inside a shop, it reports the trade's own standards and technical literature rather than personal shop-floor practice.

How claims are sourced

Claims on this site fall into three tiers, and they are written differently:

Cited facts. Figures taken from a published standard, a machine or resin manufacturer's documentation, a trade body, or other public technical literature. These appear in the Sources and references section of the article, with a link wherever the source is publicly reachable.
Qualified generalizations. Common practice that is real but not standardized — where different shops legitimately do it differently. These are written with hedges that are meant literally: "often", "many suppliers", "depending on the resin". A hedge on this site is a signal that the number moves, not filler.
Buyer framing. The questions to ask, the trade-offs to weigh, the things to get in writing. This is judgment, offered as judgment.

Background material versus citable sources

Research for this site includes technical training material, supplier design standards, and industry documents that are not publicly available. Material like that can inform what a guide covers — which failure modes are worth explaining, which questions actually come up on a program — but it is never cited as authority and never presented as an industry-wide standard. A number that cannot be traced to a source a reader could check is either verified against public documentation before publication or written as a qualified generalization. Anonymous documents do not become authoritative by being quoted.

The editor's own sourcing experience is treated the same way. It shapes which questions a guide asks and which failure modes get explained, but it is not evidence: one person's programs, suppliers, and part types are not a standard, and nothing here is presented as one because "I have seen it go that way."

What this site does not publish

Invented prices, lead times, tolerances, yields, or statistics. Cost figures are sourced and framed as illustrative, never as a quote.
Fabricated case studies, customer stories, or test results. This site does not run its own molding trials or lab testing, does not publish anyone else's as its own, and does not turn confidential program history into public case studies.
Supplier recommendations, rankings, or "vetted" lists. No company on this site has been audited by it.
Absolute claims that the trade knows to be conditional — that offshore is always cheaper, that aluminum always cuts lead time, that one process always wins.
Paid placement or sponsored coverage of any kind.

Independence and conflicts of interest

Disclosure: the editor continues to work independently as a mold sourcing specialist. Readers are entitled to know that, and to weigh it. The line between that work and this site is absolute: the site does not broker projects, take RFQ submissions, accept referral fees or paid placement, operate a supplier network, or recommend individual suppliers, and it offers no route from these pages to hiring the editor.

Practically, that means a guide here should never quietly favor the arrangement that suits a sourcing agent — offshore over domestic, an agent over a direct relationship, a bigger tooling package over a smaller one. If a page reads that way to you, it is a defect in the page, and reporting it is welcome.

This site does not manufacture parts. It is not affiliated with, and does not represent, any former Plastics Technology Alliance participant. Where a company is named, it is named as an example or as public historical context, not as an endorsement.

Updates and corrections

Guides are revised as sources change or as errors surface. Substantive revisions update the date shown on the article. Corrections are made in the article itself rather than quietly deleted.

If something here is wrong, tell us: [email protected]. Please include the page and what you believe is incorrect. Corrections from people who do this work for a living are the most valuable feedback this site receives.

Limits

Nothing here is engineering, legal, or financial advice, and no page can account for your specific part, resin, tolerance stack, volume, or supplier. Use these guides to ask better questions, then confirm the answers with a qualified supplier before you commit tooling.