Hello there,

I will attempt to answer your question as asked.

Yes, is the simple answer if you are considering purchasing from a specific manufacturer. The parts from each specific company, however are seldom if ever interchangeable.

Most manufacturers will supply standard sizes in their hot manifolds. You attach standard heaters either tubular or cartridge or both to this manifold. You control the heaters with thermocouples, all pretty standard fare.

The complexity is in the type and size and number of drops you need in the manifold. These can be very simple to more complicated valve gated drops or heat wicking drops.

Valve gated drops are used to fill larger more complicated parts. The beauty is that they can be timed to open in sequence to fill the part allowing you to control the knit-lines of the melt flow. This is really important on appearance parts.

If you have the finances you should have a mold flow analysis done prior to committing to any vendor. The vendors are really hurting right now and the moldflow can be negotiated easily into the price. It is fascinating how close the mold flow analysis is to the actual finished physical mold.

I had 145 molds to make ranging in size from 100 presses to 2800 ton presses and mold weights of 600 Lbs to 34,000lbs.

We had mold flows done on at least 112 molds.

There were only two tools with problems and they were the two giants, weighing in at 34k and 32k Lbs.

The mold flow analysis actually pointed out a weakness in the initial design but it was ignored for cost sake. Later mold testing failed and the recommended manifolds and bore balanced drops were necessary at a large expense. All other molds and hot runner manifolds have worked flawlessly to date - ~ 2.75 years into production.

As a special note, it is very important to pre-heat all hot runner molds prior to taking the first shot. This allows all the components to expand and seal off against the extremely high molding pressures.

If this is missed even once, plastic will leak and once the door is open it is impossible to seal off metal to metal. The manifold will fill with plastic. It will cost $ 1200-1600 for new wiring and parts and seals and take a days miserable work to chip plastic from the manifold.

I hope this was helpful. If you want more specifics I can be contacted with a direct mail and I can certainly guide you a little better.

Good Luck.