When you’re reading brochures sent out by plastic fabrication plants, it’s fairly common to find highlighted passages that talk of custom design services, and this lofty work ideal extends to customised plastic and rubber mouldings. While it’s true that moulding work, by its very nature, encourages the batch production of thousands upon thousands of identical rubber widgets and plastic doodads, client specifications are still very much a core value of the service.
In taking a blueprint from its just-spawned paper form to a final production version, the success of a smart manufacturing environment could in no way be guaranteed by two-dimensional thinking. A point-to-point service would produce the part, create the initial mould and start churning out the component in great mountains, all ready for packaging and marketing, but this manufacturing model is top-heavy, biased toward the end of the cycle. Customised plastic and rubber mouldings restore uniformity to the engineering cycle by placing just as much emphasis on the customer’s needs. This could be as simple as changing the chemical composition of the polymer ever so slightly to match the material specifications set in stone by the client or as complex as a short loop modification model, a cycling loop where the component’s base design is continually amended and taken through several revisions until the custom mould matches the client’s design criteria.
The initial design, not surprisingly, may never function as the original concept intended, which is purely down to the fact that concepts need fine tuning before theory can become a functioning application. Next, the tailor-made products avoid the homogeneous problems that come from mass production work. In short, these generic items do function as designed, spawning again and again from faceless moulds, but they don’t perform with the stellar efficiency seen in customised products. The tailored alternative is precisely commissioned to meet exhaustively set dimensional standards and experimentally determined material specifications. The result of these laborious endeavours is a product that exhibits every material characteristic and every dimensional target as determined by the original prototype and all of its subsequent revisions.
The high volume fabrication of customised plastic and rubber mouldings is an extremely specialized service, one that should be appraised and quantified before moving ahead in a project. Select an enterprising engineering plastics partner that promotes such diversified work, a professional solution that offers affordable customization services. Make the most of the design, and align with a fabrication team that will treat the part to something that goes far beyond basic uniformity to deliver the component in its premium form, an exactingly measured profile that mirrors the designer’s original concept so that the product can enter high volume production while retaining its customised roots.