Cleaning injection molds by hand is very inefficient, but dry ice blasting can drastically reduce the time needed to achieve a total clean and resume production.

Key Takeaways:

Silgan Plastics reduced the time required to clean its plastic injection molds by as much as 75% by switching its cleaning method away from hand cleaning with solvents to dry ice blasting. The process cleaned packaging molds quickly and efficiently without any damage or leftover residue.

The Customer: Silgan Plastics

Silgan Plastics is the largest supplier of metal containers for food products in North America and a leading supplier of plastic containers for personal care products. With more than 22 production plants, Silgan Plastics is one of the top blow molders in North America.

Dry ice blasting is the most effective deburring and deflashing method

It is not uncommon for unwanted material to be left on a plastic part after machining or molding.

Burrs can be the result of numerous manufacturing processes: grinding, drilling, milling, turning, tapping, slotting, etc. They can manifest themselves in the forms of various types: roll-over, tear, flag and even poisson burrs.

It is essential to remove this unwanted material from the manufactured part without altering the dimensional tolerances or marring the surface. So when deflashing and deburring becomes necessary, a quality solution is also essential.

Whether in removing parting line flash or material burrs, traditional methods have often fallen short. These methods can be slow, involve human error and inconsistencies, cause grit entrapment, and cross contamination.

Introduction

Miniature Precision Components was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost labor expenses, defective parts, and damaged equipment all because of inadequate cleaning methods.

For Tyco Electronics, the world's largest supplier of automotive electronic components, conventional cleaning processes for its injection molding equipment were cutting into vital production time.

Cleaning injection molds can cause a lot of unnecessary downtime in automotive production. Dry ice blasting is the rare alternative that can both reduce downtime and provide a thorough cleaning.

Silgan Plastics devoted countless hours to maintaining product molds by hand, but the company was still unhappy with the quality of its cleaning methods.

The tools and equipment used in the medical device manufacturing process require absolute precision.

Special attention to the intricacies of medical devices is critical as the end product must be pristine and uncompromised. Like the end product, the equipment used in the manufacturing process must be maintained to ensure that the products are delivered without flaws or excess material and ready for use.

Performance Plastics specializes in high performance injection molding. The company produces small, complex, high quality parts.

For 30 years, they’ve focused on the application of these highly engineered plastics for the performance advantages that they provide when producing intricate part geometries with extremely tight tolerances. They excel at helping companies in the medical device, energy, aerospace/defense, industrial, electronics and food and beverage industries solve current product problems or to create competitive next generation advantages.