While there are many ways to manufacture plastic products, custom plastic extrusion services offer numerous advantages while maintaining a straightforward process. Cost-effectiveness, rapid production, and minimal waste are just a few of the benefits to this production style.

Port Erie Plastics guides you through the custom plastic extrusion process step by step and highlights a few benefits here.

Custom Plastic Extrusion: The Process

Even for a custom product, plastic extrusion is a straightforward process that follows standard steps.

Material Selection

This is arguably the most important step in the custom plastic extrusion process. Choosing the wrong material can lead to lost time and avoidable costs.

Customers and manufacturers should work together to identify which plastic material works best for the given product based on a few factors such as product application, the environment it will be in, and how long the part needs to last.

Common examples of plastics used include high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polypropylene, poly vinyl chloride (PVC), and polystyrene. All four of these materials offer great strength and durability, as well as chemical and temperature resistance.

Feeding

After preparation, the resin is fed into a hopper that leads the material into the extrusion machine. This journey ends when the material meets the extruder screw where the next step takes place.

Melting

Once the resin hits the extruder screw, rotation begins from the screw where it pushes the resin into a heated barrel and melts it.

Extrusion

After the resin melts, it is then pushed out into a die where the melted material begins to take its designed shape.

Cooling

Once the die has been filled, the product is pulled and the cooling process begins. This can be done with air chillers or water coolers.

Finishing and Quality Control

The product has cooled and is in its final form. Any finishing touches are applied, such as coloring or surface touch-ups. From there, it will undergo extensive quality control measures, ensuring that the product is deemed fit to serve its intended purpose.

Uses and Benefits of Custom Plastic Extrusion

A custom product is going to have numerous benefits beyond a standard production run, but it goes deeper than that. Explore these common uses and key benefits to custom plastic extrusion services.

Uses

Common uses of custom plastic extruded products include:

• Architectural trims
• Window frames
• Medical tubing
• Furniture trim
• Greenhouse frames

Benefits

• Cost-effective
  • Custom plastic extrusion is cost-effective, especially for high-volume production runs. The low tooling costs, material efficiency, and ability to create continuous parts make it a more economical choice than other manufacturing methods like injection molding.
• Design flexibility
  • A custom product means a design that’s unique to both the customer and the manufacturer. You can create the most complex design without sacrificing product durability.
• Faster production method
  • Compared to alternative plastic production styles such as injection molding, plastic extrusion — even for custom runs — is faster.

Trust Port Erie Plastics For Your Custom Plastic Extrusion Services

Port Erie Plastics has been an industry leader for over seven decades in the plastics solutions space. As the needs and demands of our customers continue to grow, so do our capabilities.

Quality is at the core of everything we do in our state-of-the-art facility. With modern machinery and quality checks throughout our manufacturing process, we are able to provide customers with peace of mind for their project.

Our plastic extrusion services are backed by the high-quality standards you should expect. We have multiple different extruder screws for enhanced capabilities, along with up to 80 feet of cooling tanks.

Looking for the right custom plastic extrusion company? Contact us today to learn more about the difference we can make with your next project.