On Tuesday 5. May 2015 01.07.40 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 10:08 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
A while back, I became interested in these matters and surfed around looking at UK-based companies offering injection moulding services. Maybe I should dig some of those links out and see if there are any collaborative opportunities. Interestingly, I think one of them was actually publicly-owned (by a local council) and was technically a non-profit.
yes please!
OK, I'm not sure if any of these are useful, but I found them educational when I was trying to figure out what kind of services people were offering. My starting point was actually wondering what the state of the industry was in the UK: plastics always seemed to be a common feature of industrial estates, at least up in the north of England, and I wondered whether it still was.
I found the following interesting because they make the fact that the customer owns the tooling a virtue. Maybe that isn't the normal practice, or maybe it's because they're so confident of their own abilities that they make a virtue of it...
http://www.omega-plastics.co.uk/
The following people are the publicly-owned company I refer to above. I just found it interesting that such organisations are still around and haven't been closed down by the powers that be:
http://www.moorlandplastics.co.uk/
The last time I made anything with plastics was at secondary school, unbelievably, so I sought out more recent guides to the technology. Here's one I found rather useful:
http://www.bpf.co.uk/Plastipedia/Processes/Injection_Moulding.aspx
Perhaps I surfed many more companies' sites and didn't think it worthwhile to note them all down. Nevertheless, I hope you can get some ideas about possible routes to production from some of this.
Paul