Are you curious about how board game companies are actually making board game miniatures step by step in a miniature manufacturing factory? Follow a complete factory tour guide from our CEO David DU in Dongguan Boyuan Eastar’s Plastic Factory, which is located in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. This memorable factory tour will be a great way for you to have a close look at how board game miniatures are manufactured and the processes involved.
In this 15,000 square meters plastic factory with over 250 workers applying their skills in different workshops and departments, thousands of board game miniatures are made in the miniature manufacturing factory every day under a very strict quality-control management system and packaged to fulfil all demands from clients.
Miniature Manufacturing Tour Begins At The File Design Department
The factory tour starts from the File design department in the miniature manufacturing factory where we have 11 professors doing the 3D graphic modification work for each board game miniature. The 3D designers will emphasize the details in the file drawing stage for PVC miniatures in order to minimize the potential dilution after each stage of miniature manufacturing. For example, normally the effect of finer details is better. But when it cannot be guaranteed, it is recommended to increase the areas of these detached details.
As a result, even after multiple steps including the silicone mold, PU stage, plaster mold and pouring to make steel mold, the final miniature piece can still have the best details displayed as the original design. It is only after the graphic file is confirmed by clients will the Red wax be printed by a 3D printer.
Complete The Molding Production In The Mold Workshops
Once the Red wax is also confirmed, the PU sample and molding production process begins at the mold workshop. Currently, our miniature manufacturing factory has two mold workshops with each manufacturing capacity of around 100 molds per month. The total capacity of 200 molds per month is actually 7 to 10 times bigger than most of the board game companies.
At the mold workshop I, both the silicon molds and mud molds are made by the vacuum machine first. Then the automatic machine will use for the further structure. All these pre-molding procedures are finished in our own workshop to ensure quality and control the fulfilled time. Considering not only the bigger capacity but also positive inner competence to improve the better quality result and fulfil time, both at the mold workshop I and II all the lines are full-capacity operating to make premium board game miniatures.
As you can tell from the molding master manually adjusting the mold cores with their professional experience over at least 20 years in the mold industry to minimize the mold lines and keep as many details as possible for the final miniature piece. What’s more, the manager of the mold department in our board game company has more than 30 years of first-hand experience with sophisticated million project management cases like Tainted Grail, Black Rose Wars, Bones Series, etc.
When a mold is ready it will be tested first to check if the mold works well for keeping the details of the miniature as well as the mold itself consistent for the miniature production process. Usually, the test mold sample will be sent to the client and only after the sample mold is confirmed will the injection process begin.
Follow Up The Injection Process Of Making Miniatures
Right after the final molds are tested and confirmed, the injection process will follow operated by 26 automatic injection machines and 17 of them are equipped with brand-new injection molding machine manipulators especially for injection molding production automation.
This automatic production equipment can imitate some functions of the upper limbs of the human body and can be automatically controlled to transport products or manipulate tools according to predetermined requirements for better quality and detailed focused board game miniatures. All of the machines are running day and night with two shifts of front-line workers to ensure on-time delivery all year in this miniature manufacturing factory.
Assembly And Inspection To Get Ready For Delivery
When the board game miniatures have finished the journey for the last step of painting depends on the specific requirement for hand painting, spray painting or fancy sundrop. They are sent to the dusty-free assembly workshop where the inspectors manually check every detail of each miniature before and after putting them into the trays so that each box will not have missing components and only contains the qualified miniatures. This one-by-one inspection for each miniature process and fully-inspection round are running in the assembly line under the strict quality control system in the factory.
In fact, as a board game company we are very willing to invest either in machines or human resources for long-term business cooperation and always improve our technology as well as management on quality-control system constantly.
Hopefully, this miniature manufacturing factory tour gives you a first-hand look and up-front understanding of how products are made and how the production line works. For any further information about board game manufacturing, feel free to Contact Us now.
