Although secondary injection molding requires more complex design, processing and material selection than single injection molding, it has significant advantages:
1. It allows material combinations to provide properties that cannot be provided by a single resin.
2. It can eliminate assembly steps, saving time and money.
3. It can fuse materials in a way incomparable to the assembly process.
4. The insert increases the strength and durability of the part.
Cost reduction and rapid production
Cladding molding can reduce the production cost. Standard injection molding can combine multiple parts into a single multi cavity mold, and secondary molding can produce a single part composed of different materials without assembly. Mold production is more complex, but it eliminates the repetitive cost of assembling thousands of parts. There are many ways to produce coated molded parts. Choosing the right method according to your needs, time to market, total output and the possibility of product replacement will help determine which method is most effective.
Prototype design and small batch operation
Pick-n-place coating molding is an ideal choice for low to medium batch production. Because it is more labor-intensive than secondary molding, the production cost of each part using this technology will tend to be higher, but it eliminates the high cost and delay of producing complex secondary molding molds. The total cost of pick-n-place is often less than twice the production capacity of 10000 pieces. This process can also be used to produce prototypes before investing in mass production of dual injection molds. If speed to market is critical, it may make sense to use pick-n-place to bring the product to market.
While waiting for full production to start. Moreover, in the market where parts need to be redesigned frequently, pick-n-place reduces the risk by allowing the mold to be redesigned, and its cost is only a small part of the cost of redesigning the mold twice.
Scope of application
Cladding molding is widely used in industries from consumer goods to automobiles and electronic components, but it is especially suitable for medical and health care applications. Devices that touch, enter or insert into the human body may have to meet stringent requirements and have challenging functions. They may have to be resistant to high temperature sterilization, chemical exposure, and meet standards including FDA, USP Class VI, ISO 10993, and biocompatibility. In many cases, no one resin can meet all requirements. In order to be safe and sterile, multiple materials may have to be matched almost seamlessly, and cladding molding is excellent in this field.
There are many other reasons for using cladding, including:
The most common are comfort and grip. Soft elastomers are often molded on hard substrates to create a safe, slip resistant grip on a variety of handheld items, from hand tools to equipment.
Because the cladding molding material is usually an elastomer, sealing, damping and damping are also common applications.
Another common application is aesthetics; The substrate may have a recessed pattern filled with a contrasting coated molding material to create a text, logo, or other design.
Cladding molding can change the characteristics of the part surface, making it have different electrical, thermal or other environmental quality.
It can also be used to capture or encapsulate something in other materials.