Clear plastic has become one of the most commonly used materials in various commercial and retail applications. From car parts to the sealable containers you find on grocery store shelves, this versatile material has been used across multiple industries for numerous products for generations. However, you may not fully understand how clear plastic parts are made for public and commercial use. Understanding how these parts are made and their potential uses can help you make a more informed decision about using them in future projects.
Why Use Clear Plastic Parts
For product designers, the parts they select for their design can have a far-reaching impact on the final product in ways they haven’t considered. For example, during the planning process, deciding to go with clear plastic usually boils down to three primary reasons — its visibility, how light travels through it, and the overall aesthetics.
Clear plastic allows you to build parts and enclosures that protect the inner workings of your product but still allow you to see it without having to take it apart, piece by piece. Sometimes you need light to pass through the materials for a practical purpose; other times, it’s purely aesthetic. Either way, clear plastic provides you with greater flexibility.
The Available Processes to Create Clear Plastic
Once you have decided on utilizing clear plastic parts in your upcoming project, you need to decide on the process you want to use to make them. While you may see techniques such as SLA, urethane casting, and CNC machining, injection molding offers the best combination of high quality, quantity, and the available materials you can use.
Benefits of Injection Molding for Clear Plastic Parts
Injection molding involves taking molten resin used to make plastic and injecting it straight into your desired metal mold for the final product. Then, you can match your needs to the molds and get the clear plastic parts you need for your upcoming project. If you need large orders of parts (10,000+) to meet your needs, production tooling can help you meet these larger orders and get the required materials.
When you have smaller orders to fulfill, you can utilize rapid tooling and its lower-cost aluminum molds for orders of 100 pieces or more. Plastic injection molding has helped countless engineers create the clear plastic parts they need to make their vision a reality, but they need the right machines to make the process as streamlined as possible. That’s where a Gravimetric Auto-Disc™ flood-fed series from Plastrac can come into play.
Trust Plastrac Whenever You Need the Devices to Make Clear Plastic Parts
Now that you know that plastic injection molding can help make the highest quality clear plastic parts, you need to know where you can find the devices to bring your visions to life in stunning detail. Plastrac offers a wide range of plastic injection molding machines that can meet your diverse needs and help facilitate your production process. Check out our Auto-Disc™ series to find your ideal fit.
Contact our team to learn more about our available models and get your high-quality clear plastic production process in motion today.