When “industry standard” pricing doesn’t make sense, sometimes the best solution is a napkin sketch and a talented local tool maker.

“We’re going through pins every shift.”

That’s the message I got from our setup team on a Thursday afternoon. Not every week. Not every day. Every. Single. Shift.

We were running structural web molding—a low-pressure nitrogen injection process that lets you fill large, thick areas of a part while reducing weight and maintaining surface finish quality. Beautiful technology when it works. Expensive nightmare when it doesn’t.

The problem? Our nitrogen injection pins cost up to $3,000 each. And we needed up to 10 pins per mold on complex parts.

You do the math. That’s $30,000 in pins for a single mold. And we were replacing them constantly.

When “Standard” Becomes Standardized Failure

The issue wasn’t the process—structural web molding is solid engineering. The issue was resin buildup.

A thin film of plastic residue would accumulate on the pins during production. In the worst cases, we’d only get one shift out of a set before they failed. When plastic got past the pin and into the nitrogen port, we were looking at costly downtime to clean the port and get timing right again.

At $3,000 per pin, this wasn’t just an operational headache. It was bleeding money.

The expensive pins had everything engineering textbooks said they should have: springs, seals, specialty fine threads, precision CNC manufacturing. They were complicated, sophisticated, and failing us shift after shift.

I kept asking myself: “Why are we accepting this?”

The Local Tool Maker Who Changed Everything

I reached out to a local tool maker I’d worked with before—someone with incredible talent and a gift for creative troubleshooting. The kind of machinist who doesn’t just make parts, but understands why those parts need to exist in the first place.

We sat down and reviewed the problems:

• Cost: $3,000 per pin was unsustainable
• Function: Resin buildup causing constant failures
• Removal: Complicated designs made changeouts time-consuming

I sketched out some thoughts on what became our working napkin. Nothing fancy—just rough ideas about simplification. He took that sketch back to his shop.

What started as a napkin drawing evolved into a living document. Each trial taught us something. Each revision got simpler, not more complex.

The Elegance of Simple

Here’s what we ended up with:

We drilled a screw into a screw.

That’s it. That’s the innovation.

We took a standard cap screw and drilled out the center. Added a tapered seat. Put in a countersunk cap screw with vent slots. Added a spring at the backend.

Instead of springs, seals, specialty threads, and custom CNC work, we had:

• Easy removal: Standard socket head cap screw—any setup person could handle it
• Built-in venting: Slots cut right into the design
• Low cost: Standard hardware instead of custom machining

The price? $500 for the initial design work. $150 per pin with volume.

Down from $3,000.

We’d just cut our pin costs by 95%.

When Problems Don’t Disappear Completely

Let me be honest: the resin buildup didn’t completely go away. The nature of plastic injection means some residue is inevitable.

But we changed how we dealt with it.

The stronger spring we added improved performance significantly. And because the pins were now $150 instead of $3,000, our setup guys could keep handfuls of them on hand.

At planned maintenance time, they’d pull all the pins and drop in fresh ones. The used pins went into an ultrasonic bath for cleaning, ready for the next mold.

No more emergency shutdowns. No more scrambling for expensive replacements. No more production delays waiting for cleaned pins.

The problem went from “crisis we manage every shift” to “routine maintenance task we plan for.”

The Front-Loading Difference

Here’s the part that matters most: we designed these pins into new molds right from the start.

That meant the correct mounting seats were machined into the tool during initial manufacturing. Everything fit perfectly. Everything worked as intended from day one.

Compare that to retrofitting: pulling the tool out of service, putting it up on the bed for rework, downtime, testing, debugging.

Front-loading this design decision meant:

• More runtime on our molds
• Less frequent preventive maintenance
• Less arduous PM procedures when they did happen
• No production interruptions for retrofitting

The setup teams loved them because they were simple. The maintenance teams loved them because they were reliable. The finance team loved them because they were cheap.

The Real Cost of “Industry Standard”

When suppliers quote $3,000 for a nitrogen injection pin, most companies just accept it. That’s the industry standard price. That’s what these things cost. That’s how it’s always been done.

But “industry standard” often means “nobody’s questioned this in years.”

We questioned it. We partnered with someone who understood machining and problem-solving. We simplified instead of adding complexity.

The result: a 95% cost reduction that actually performed better in real-world production conditions.

The Questions Every Engineer Should Ask

When you’re facing expensive “standard” components in your manufacturing process, ask yourself:

What problem is this component actually solving? Not what the marketing materials say—what problem does it solve in your specific application?

Could we achieve the same result more simply? Sometimes sophisticated engineering is necessary. Often, it’s just expensive.

Do we have local partners who could collaborate on a solution? The tool maker who helped us didn’t just execute our design—he improved it through his expertise.

What would front-loading this solution save us downstream? It’s not just the component cost—it’s the maintenance time, the downtime, the emergency repairs, the interrupted production.

From Napkin Sketch to Production Reality

That napkin sketch conversation led to:

• $30,000 per mold reduced to $1,500 in pin costs
• Shift-by-shift failures eliminated
• Routine maintenance instead of emergency repairs
• Production uptime dramatically improved
• Setup teams with confidence instead of frustration

None of this required breakthrough technology. It required willingness to question assumptions and partnership with someone who could turn ideas into reality.

The most expensive lesson in manufacturing isn’t always the one you learn from failure. Sometimes it’s the one you learn from never questioning why things cost what they do.

What “industry standard” component in your manufacturing process could use a fresh look? Sometimes the best engineering solutions come from asking “Why does it have to be this way?” and finding a local expert willing to help you answer that question.

About the Author: With 35 years in injection molding, tooling, and manufacturing project management, I’ve learned that the most elegant solutions often come from simplification, not complication. Launchpad Project Management helps manufacturers implement front-loaded design thinking that prevents expensive problems before they start.