Minigrips connect coffee stirrer straws together as a versatile building toy. Through multiple injection mold, material, and injection shot recipe iterations, I arrived at the final design shown made from a flexible Dynaflex G2701 material with levers to assist in gripper opening and an intentional bend point for different construction angles.

The final mold was a 16-cavity mold with a cycle time of 2.8 seconds per part. I produced a total of 1500 final parts.

Minigrips were designed and made in Stanford’s Making Multiples: Injection Molding class (ME325), Spring 2017 and were featured in The Stanford Daily. Minigrips went on to be used in outreach activities for the Stanford Product Realization Lab.