How to Manufacture Car Instrument Panels?

In the manufacturing of auto parts, instrument panel is one of the most common auto parts. Nowadays, automobile instrument panels are mostly produced by plastic manufacturing. With the development of automobiles in terms of safety and environmental protection, people have higher and higher requirements for safety and environmental protection for automotive parts. Meanwhile, more and more instrument panels adopt appearance design of seamless airbags, which puts forward higher and higher requirements on the manufacturing process of the instrument panels.
 
Automobile instrument panel is an important part of automobile interior parts. All instrument panel related parts are collectively referred to as instrument panel assembly. The instrument panel and the auxiliary instrument panel form the main and auxiliary instrument panels. The instrument panel assembly is the largest assembly series of automotive interior parts. The instrument panel is a component that integrates safety, comfort and decoration. The car instrument panel is generally divided into two types the hard type and soft type. With the installation of airbags, the safety requirements for people have been lost for soft instrument panels. Therefore, as long as appearance quality is guaranteed, it is completely feasible to use low-cost hard instrument panels. The instrument panel assembly is mainly composed of upper and lower instrument panel bodies, defrost ducts, air outlets, combined instrument guards, storage boxes, glove boxes, central control panels, ashtrays and other parts.
 
The main process of automobile instrument panels
The processes and procedures involved are also quite different based on different instrument panels, which can be roughly summarized as the following:
 
Hard plastic instrument panels
Injection molding instrument panel bodies and other parts→welding main parts→assembling related parts
 
Semi-rigid foam instrument panels
Injection molding or pressing skeletons of instrument panels→vacuum molding skins and skeletons→cutting holes and edges→related parts assembly
 
Semi-rigid foam instrument panels
Injection molding parts such as dashboard frames
 
Vacuum molding instrument panels
Slush molding skins→foaming foam layers→cutting edges and holes→welding main parts→related parts assembly
 
Product analysis
The product is the instrument panel in the cab of a brand-name car, the material is PP+EPDM-TD20, and the shrinkage rate is 0.95%. Among them, EPDM can improve the elasticity of plastic parts, and T20 refers to the addition of 20% talcum powder to the material, which is used to improve the rigidity of the instrument panel.

Mold structure analysis
The instrument panel has 4 lateral concave-convex structures, a total of 4 lateral core pulls needed to be designed, as it is shown in the figure above. The lateral core pulling mechanism is the most important and complex structure of the mold.

Overall structure for molds
The instrument panel injection mold adopts a hot runner gating system, the fixed and movable molds are all integrated rather than inlaid. The mold adopts square guide pillars and inner mold tube positioning. There are also back molds with a inlaid structure. For large-scale automobile injection molds, the orientation and positioning system directly affects the accuracy of the product and the service life of the mold. This mold adopts 4 square guide posts to guide between the movable and fixed molds.