Raccoon poker chip

A custom-tooled poker chip with a raccoon emboss, designed and produced through the full injection-molding pipeline for Stanford's ME 325. The motif chose itself; the design exercise was the same regardless of subject.

The work was end-to-end: CAD design of the chip and the cavity, parting-line strategy, sprue and runner sizing, gate location and type, ejector pin layout, and vent geometry. The mold tool was machined in the Stanford shop: manual operations for the simple features and CNC for the raccoon emboss and the rim lettering.

Once the tool was on the press, every shot is diagnostic. Short shots tell you the gate is undersized or the cycle pressure is too low. Flash on the parting line tells you the platen force is wrong or the parting surfaces aren't flat. Sink marks at thick sections tell you the part isn't packing out evenly during the hold phase. Burn marks tell you a vent is blocked. The iteration loop is: tighten the cycle, observe the part, adjust the tool or the parameters, run again.

The chips themselves are pigmented LDPE. They stack well, they have a satisfying weight, and they bear the marks of every decision made in the tool. As an exercise, injection molding teaches that the part you ship is downstream of the geometry you carve into metal.