Plastics

The majority of what we do is injection moulded plastics - both the toolmaking and the moulding - and both of these are done in-house.

Toolmaking

Our toolmaking capacity is about 20 average sized tools per month. The tool room runs 24 hours per 6 or 7 days per week depending on our workload.

The main tool steels we use are:

718H is a Swedish (Assab) pre-hardened tool steel and is equivalent to AISI P21. We mainly use it for PC and ABS parts.
NAK80 is a Japanese (Daido) pre-hardened tool steel and is equivalent to AISI P21. We mainly use it for PC and ABS parts.
M300 is a German (Bohler) high chromium pre-hardened tool steel and is equivalent to AISI 420. We mainly use it for Acrylic parts that require a mirror finish.
S136H is Swedish (Assab) pre-hardened stainless tool steel and is equivalent to AISI 420. We mainly use it for PVC parts.
All of the tool steels are pre-hardened and have a minimum life of 300,000 shots with minimal maintenance. With normal maintenance, the tools should have a life of at least 1,000,000 shots. We do NOT use soft steel, even if the moulding quantity is only low. The smallest job we have done is to mould 164 parts from a tool capable of making 300,000 but that is all the customer wanted.

Moulding

The majority of the plastic we use is from well know companies such as GE and Dow from the USA and ChiMei from Taiwan. We use very little China made plastic because it is inconsistent from batch to batch.

For the mouldings, we now have 6 injection machines as follows:

Machine Size

Max. Shot Weight (grams)

Max. Tool Size (mm)

1 x 280 ton

798

600x600

1 x 210 ton

435

430x430

1 x180 ton

324

410x380

2 x 140 ton

216

380x380

1 x 100 ton

120

350x350

The longest part we have do so far is half a tube 450mm long and 90mm diameter.

The largest part we can currently mould in a rectangular shape, on the 280 ton machine, is about 350x300mm, depending on the depth of the part.

Multi-cavity tools identify each moulded part as 1, 2, 3, 4 etc via an ejector pin.

Samples from tool trials are identified as A, B, C etc via an ejector pin.

For further information about our plastics capabilities, please click on the links to the left.

* For more detailed information, please email us HERE