When To Choose Plastic Stamping For Your Custom Parts

Plastic stamping can significantly reduce material cost, increase production rates and improve dimensional consistency when used in place of machining to create custom parts and components.

In plastic stamping, we utilize a die and a high-speed punch press to yield extremely precise identical parts: washers, gaskets, seals, insulators, graphics and more. Our dies are custom steel-rule and CNC machined for incredible precision and customization. Because we provide precision die cutting, our clients can count on their parts holding tight tolerances at high volumes.

Plastic stamping is often the ideal choice for a client’s application, but when is this most likely? In this blog, we’ll consider a few factors that make plastic stamping the best method for manufacturing custom parts from plastic or other non-metallic materials.

Plastic Stamping: 3 Signs You Should Stamp Your Parts

You might think a part can’t be stamped, and in some cases you may be right. But in other instances, using stamping instead of machining or another method can yield cost savings you’d hardly believe—while improving daily production rates by the thousands.

Here are three signs you should take advantage of precision die cutting and stamping for your custom plastic part:

• You’re producing the part in high volumes. Stamping may be more expensive at the onset than machining, but you’ll recoup the tooling costs of stamping easily if you’re producing your part at high volumes. Plastic stamping is known for its low cost in large quantities, making it ideal for big orders. Improving your ability to keep pace with production requirements should ultimately reduce your losses as well.

• You’re using a very expensive material. Stamping produces less scrap than machining, so if you’re investing in an advanced plastic, it could be worthwhile to design the part to be stamped. Once again, this consideration is even more important at high volumes, in which the costs of scrapping expensive plastics are only amplified. In the end, you may not be able to stamp every part, but it’s always worth exploring the possibility.

• You’re slowly, expensively producing a part that could be re-designed for stamping manufacturability. As we’ve stated, some parts just can’t be stamped and must be machined, as often happens when the part has significant variations in thickness and many sharp corners. But in other cases, the part can be re-designed for stamping manufacturability. This usually involves creating thickness consistency and eliminating sharp corners, but if these things can be accomplished, the client reaps the benefits of faster production and lower costs at high volumes.

Reading Plastic: Your Source of Precision Die Cutting & Machining

Turn to Reading Plastic for your precision die cutting & stamping services. As experts in both machining and stamping, we know both processes inside and out, and can lend you sound advice about which is better suited for your project. We’re also familiar with almost every advanced plastic on the market, so we can guide you to the one that meets your requirements.

Give us a call at (610) 926-3245 or email site2@readingplastic.com to talk to us about your project today!