For more than 70 years, Ray Products has built a reputation as a premier provider of pressure formed plastic parts. With a commitment to constantly upgrade our facilities with the highest quality equipment and latest technology, today we can manufacture custom plastic parts using our advanced, heavy-gauge pressure forming process, delivering the highest quality in the business while reducing tooling costs and turnaround times. With our experience, Ray Products will help guide what pressure forming is, the advantages of pressure forming, and what makes Ray Products a complete partner for your next project.
In this Plastics Industry Pulse, we will examine how thermoforming popularity compares by industry and why that matters. New to thermoforming? Thermoforming involves heating a plastic sheet to a pliable temperature and shaping it to a mold using air or vacuum pressure (or a combination of both). It is then cooled, removed from the mold, and trimmed. Secondary operations can then be performed. Learn more about thermoforming here.
In this Plastics Industry Pulse, we’ll ask some questions about the 2019-2020 Annual Report data on changes in process popularity, with a special eye on injection molding.
Did you know: This is the sixth year that we’ve collected data on Process Popularity in the Plastics Industry.
Looking back on previous years as a comparison, this year’s data demonstrates a marked change in the popularity of injection molding. Over the last four years, respondents have indicated a growing interest in injection molding (59% in 2015, growing to 73% last year), while this year it took a 38% year-over-year dip to plunge to only 45%. Time will tell if this is just a statistical anomaly or if this represents an ongoing trend.
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In this Plastics Industry Pulse, we’ll examine the issue of recyclability as it relates to the plastics industry, while also considering overall trends in the industry in terms of production.
Last month, the Society of Plastics Engineers’ held their annual Thermoforming Conference, where clients, vendors and industry leaders come together for innovative and informative thermoforming workshops and sessions.
One of the best parts of the event is the Parts Competition, which showcases the latest advances in thermoforming design and applications. The best parts receive awards, and we were thrilled to win a silver award this year for a multi-part medical device we made for a client in southern California.
A bit more about the (award-winning, sorry we had to) part:
After developing prototypes that used urethane casting to create the enclosure panels, a medical device manufacturer client was ready to move to mid-scale production. But they quickly realized that the urethane casting process would mean limited manufacturing capacity, high cost per part and could yield issues with consistency from part to part. We had a solution: pressure forming.
By switching from urethane casting to pressure forming, our client was able to significantly lower costs, improve manufacturing speed, increase durability and guarantee part-to-part repeatability while simultaneously planning for future increases in demand and capacity.
We worked closely with the client to reduce the total number of losses, adding in undercut features for rigidity and improved fit, and making other alterations to lower manufacturing and assembly costs and improving aesthetics.
We’re grateful for the recognition (including the shout out in Plastics News) and are gunning for the gold next year!
This is the sixth post in our series from our Thermoforming Handbook, a guide that, until now, was only available to our customers and partners. We’re releasing the whole thing in a series of posts right here on our blog.
We’ve previously released:
- Chapter 1: An Overview of Thermoforming
- Chapter 2: Designing for Thermoforming
- Chapter 3: Tooling, The Foundation of Thermoforming
- Chapter 4: Thermoforming Materials Selection
- Chapter 5: Thermoforming Tolerances
If you’re someone who uses custom plastic manufacturing professionally and you’re interested in getting your own copy, just send us a message and we’ll be happy to send you one. As always, these are general guidelines. Any project or design needs to be reviewed by a qualified thermoforming professional before it goes into production, and the sooner you get one of those qualified professionals involved in the process, the smoother things tend to go. If you’re looking for a qualified professional, we know a few who would be happy to help.
Every part that comes out of a thermoforming machine must be trimmed. In 1949 when Ray Products was founded, this process was carried out with hand tools. Today, we use high-precision 6-axis trimming robots to carry out the process quickly, and cost-effectively.