Friday, January 10, 2014

The Services Of Custom Thermoforming Companies

By Marissa Velazquez


Thermoforming is a process of manufacturing plastic to create a usable product. The process involves heating a sheet of plastic to a pliable forming temperature, molding it to form a specific shape, and finally, the product is trimmed to form the desired product needed. When heating, the temperatures should be high enough so that the sheet can be molded and cooled to the desired appearance of the output. Custom thermoforming companies therefore try to make products in line with the needs of their clients.

Apart from plastic thermoforming or custom thermoforming, the process is also referred with other industry terminologies. The process is also referred as vacuum forming or pressure forming, which still share the same process with plastic forming. The process follows a similar criterion and uses three basic factors; heat, pressure and vacuum.

There are specific quality measures that must be put in place to ensure proper production through this process. Examples include controlled computers, temperature, humidity as well as using in-line machinery. These aspects are collectively used to ensure sustainability and production of high quality packaging products.

Buying the thermo-formers from the same manufacturer is highly recommendable. This is because it restores efficiency and equally reduces the cost of making purchase and maintenance. Additionally, it also promotes skill setting, improved technical staff familiarity, tooling standardization as well as minimizing spare part inventory.

Standardized tooling, in particular, can also be used to aid the manufacturing process by enhancing the changeover of the tooling. This also promotes shorter and profitable runs. In order to ensure efficiency, the equipment should meet certain qualities. For instance, it should have high level setting of various functioning parts.

There are many forms of thermoforming processes and with the simplest being the use of a small tabletop sized machine to heat the tiny cut pieces of plastic films and expand or stretch it over using vacuum. His process is largely used when sampling . On the other hand, there are sophisticated methods as well. In this methods, large scale machines are used to heat and shape up the plastic sheets then the pieces formed are continuously trimmed in very high speed . There are many finished products produced here compared to the basic method, however, the bulk of production greatly depends on the machine, the size of each mold and the number of parts being formed.

The process can be categorized into two sets; thin gauge and thick gauge methods. The thick gauge method is used for production of car doors, manufacturing of liners for the refrigerators, plastic ballets, and dash panels. Thin gauge however is designed for manufacturer of medical and food products and retail industry products.

In the high-volume method, an extruder or roll feeds plastic films into a series of chains that pierce the sheets using the spikes or pins that are on the chains. The spikes also move the sheets to an oven where they are heated to the suitable temperatures. They are then taken to a form center where a mating mold and pressure-box close on the sheet then a vacuum is applied to eliminate all the gases trapped and also pull the material onto the mold together with pressured air. This will shape the plastic to the exact appearance of the mold. Most custom thermoforming companies try to produce exactly what the client needs.




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