Plastic is used for many many different applications and is a truly unique material that has a great deal of benefits over alternatives such as steel. Most of the benefits are clear but due to the technology that is now being applied to plastic polymer we now make many different components from plastic that wouldn’t have been dreamt of 20 years ago.
What is Injection Moulding?
Injection moulding is a process that utilises specially manufactured machinery to inject molten plastic into the mould tooling. This then solidifies to form the desired component. The injection pressures involved can be huge (approximately 130 bar) and the clamping forces also have to be huge to cope. Ledwell has machinery that can clamp to 440 tonnes to put that into a visual context a double decker bus weighs in at approximately 7 tonnes unladen so you’d need over 62 to hold some of our mould tooling shut during production!
Materials
Having spent many years producing components for many different sectors in hundreds of grades and types of plastic material we have gained an in depth knowledge of what actually works for specific applications. Ledwell also benefits from expert guidance from our material suppliers, so if we can’t help we know a man who can.
How big or how small?
Having a wide range of clamping forces allows us to be flexible on sizes of components we can produce. We can mould parts weighing 1 gram up to 1.5 kilo. To give you an idea of the largest moulding we have produced to date our own Sledge measures 900mm long x 450mm wide x 90mm deep.
Plant list
- 60 ton x1
- 95 ton x 2
- 135 ton x 1
- 200 ton x 1
- 250 ton x 5
- 380 ton x 15
- 440 ton x 5
