The Plastic injection molding machines

Introduction:

Plastic is an integral part of any household today. You go to any house, you will find at least a dozen, if not more, different kinds of plastic items. It could range from buckets to mugs, and bottles, kitchen containers to writing implements like pens etc. The list could be endless. Has it ever occurred to your mind as to how these plastic items got their shape? If you go to a shop selling plastic items, you would find many plastic items of identical shapes, designs, and sizes. This is because they are the products from the same mold. Therefore, the mold gets the main credit for the shape of the plastic items.

The mold manufacturers:

The plastic mold manufacturers have a very important place in the plastics industry. Without them, no plastic goods can come into the market. Every plastics manufacturer would require molds for manufacturing their articles. Every item would require a different kind of mold. The molds are iron and steel rectangular blocks with gaps in between them at strategic places.

The procedure followed by the plastics manufacturers

You would find two rectangular blocks as molds. The manufacturer would join them and make it into a single mold. The plastics manufacturers inject the molten plastic into these blocks. The molten plastic flows into the gaps and solidifies on cooling. On separating the two blocks, you would find the plastic molded in the shape of the gaps that you had on the molds.

The plastic injection molding machines

The plastic manufacturers use plastic granules as their raw material. They pour these granules into an iron container. They heat this iron container to high temperatures thereby resulting in the melting of the plastic granules. The molten plastic can flow freely. The manufacturers then use the plastic injection molding machines to inject the molten plastic into the molds.

The history of the machines:

The world’s first plastic injection molding machine was a crude variety of the modern day CNC (Computer Numeric Control) plastic injection molding machines. The credit for manufacturing this machine should go to the Wyatt brothers John Wesley Wyatt and Isaiah Wyatt in 1872. The first machine was like a large hypodermic needle using a plunger to inject the molten plastic into the mold.

Subsequently, the machine saw numerous improvements to reach the stage today where everything is automatic. This includes the crushing of the granules, feeding the crushed granules into the furnace, injecting the molten plastic into the molds, etc. The granules would usually be white in color. The plastics manufacturers can add the colors to the plastic when they are in the molten state. Today, you have machines to scrape the rough edges of the initial product and cleaning and polishing them to reach the final product stage.

Final words

These plastic molding machines have a very important place in the industry today. They have a high demand as well. As long as people use plastic items in their homes, these machines would continue to exist and flourish as well.