Plastic injection molding
In most of the industry, part design, mold design, mold making and processing each sit with different people in different departments. Sutorius Industries brings all four disciplines together under one technical lead, in one shop in Fairport, New York.
About
Evan Sutorius began his career in injection molding in 2000, as a high school intern at a local molding company. He went on to spend four years as a mold designer building high-volume production tooling for automotive, medical, packaging and consumer products, earning a degree in mechanical engineering technology while working full time. The work covered cube molds, two- and three-shot molds, in-mold rotation and insert molding. One project was a 32-cavity cube mold made up of more than 11,000 individual components.
In 2009 he joined LSI Solutions, designing surgical instruments with a focus on plastic part design. The company had no injection molding capability and no way to prototype the parts he was designing, so he asked them to buy a molding machine. That purchase was the beginning of the molding department he would later manage. When the first molds were needed, he guided people who had never built a mold through building them, on a wire EDM, a Prototrak bed mill and a manual lathe.
LSI put up a building for the department, and Evan created and led it — roughly 20 people across mold design, mold making and processing. There had been no mold making capability before, so he specified and installed the equipment that made it possible, from the molding presses to the mills and EDM machines. He designed several hundred prototype and production molds there and built them in house, along with the clean room molding cells for the automated production lines.
For the last decade and a half he has worked with 3D printed tooling alongside conventional steel, at times designing and printing several molds a day. Ahead of a visit from a group of surgeons, he printed molds for six parts starting on a Monday and had the molded parts built into finished devices by Friday of the same week.
The printed mold work has had one goal from the start. Print a mold that produces the part you want, not the part that makes the process work. Printed molds have been possible for years, but they have usually cost something to get there: draft angles pushed from one degree to five or seven, a resin chosen to suit the mold rather than the part, hours of hand fitting, and a tool that gives out after a few shots. The work started with FDM molds, which handled soft rubber materials and nothing harder, and arrived at resin DLP printing paired with a rethought approach to the molding process itself. The molds now last for the runs they are needed for, in the resin the part actually calls for, without the part being changed to suit the tooling.
He founded Sutorius Industries in 2026 and leads part design, mold design and molding on every project.
Press
3D Printing Accelerates R&D Process For Prototyping Molds — MoldMaking Technology, February 2025
Equipment
- Arburg Allrounder 320 C
- 55 tons
- Minijector 55E
- 25 tons
Supported by quick change universal mold frames.
Brands
BounceCats — molded pet products, designed and manufactured in house.
Contact
1000 Turk Hill Road, Suite J
Fairport, NY 14450