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Latest Articles

Meet Mario Del Real, RL Hudson Director of Business Development

Tell us about your experience as a Territory Manager at RL Hudson? I started at RL Hudson in 2015 supporting the mid-west region as a Territory Manager. I was responsible […]

Posted March 3rd - jessica.putz

Meet Mike Glynn, RL Hudson Territory Manager

Tell us about your experience as a Territory Manager at RL Hudson? What I am most proud of is our integrity and how we treat our customers.  We have a […]

Posted September 2nd - jessica.putz

How have sales changed for RL Hudson during the pandemic?

Amid COVID-19 pandemic, how has the way RL Hudson sells to current and future customers look different? Very early on when COVID-19 became an international crisis we really had to […]

Posted August 25th - jessica.putz

RL Hudson addresses supply chain challenges

What are some supply chain issues RL Hudson is facing? In today’s supply chain, challenges are around every corner and driven by a wide range of factors, including demand, labor […]

Posted July 20th - jessica.putz

RLH Manufacturing – Above & Beyond

RL Hudson Manufacturing has been “Making Above and Beyond Seem Ordinary” lately. Living this Core Value was evident in recent weeks when our Customer Service Team, Manufacturing Team, Tooling Department, […]

Posted March 5th - christina

RLH voted BEST PLACES TO WORK 2019 by Rubber & Plastics News

Posted December 2nd - christina

RLH Employees honored as 2019 Emerging Mfg Leaders

Please join us in congratulating Hannah Snyder and Kasey Moore for being selected as 2019 Emerging Manufacturing Leaders. This award is sponsored by the Broken Arrow Chamber of Commerce and […]

Posted August 27th - christina

Our custom molded plastic product development process

Posted April 23rd - RL Hudson

The Absolute Best Plastic Injection Molded Design Tips and Considerations

Design and molding. When it comes to custom plastic injection molded parts, these two undertakings must be considered together. As a top manufacturer of custom plastic injection molded parts, we […]

Posted March 28th - RL Hudson

Design Areas Prone to Stress Concentration

Posted March 14th - RL Hudson

Posted December 28th - RL Hudson

The Long Run Advantage of Designing Custom Plastic Parts for Heavy Trucks with Reliability and Longevity in Mind

On the open road, it’s still endless entertainment for kids traveling in cars to hear heavy trucks blow their air horns as they pass. Do you remember signaling to get […]

Posted November 28th - RL Hudson

Rubber Hose Manufacturing

Posted October 30th - RL Hudson

Rubber Hose Manufacturing: From Anatomy to Applications and Beyond

Whether it’s a roaring truck engine or speeding Ski-doo cutting through fresh powder, you can bet vibration plays an important role when it comes to designing and manufacturing parts for […]

Posted September 26th - RL Hudson

Vibration Control

Posted August 31st - RL Hudson

How A Part Gets Its Start

Whether it’s plastic injection molded parts for marine engines or rubber components for recreational marine applications, the road from part conception to delivery is long and winding. What does it […]

Posted July 31st - RL Hudson

RL Hudson & Company announces acquisition of specialized precision plastic injection molding company, Rapid Production Tooling, Inc.

TULSA, Oklahoma — RL Hudson has completed the acquisition of Colorado based Rapid Production Tooling, Inc., a technically superior injection molding tooling company.  The acquisition will allow RL Hudson to […]

Posted July 2nd - christina

Metal to Plastic Conversions

Posted June 27th - RL Hudson

Concepting for Cost Control: How Design for Manufacturability Creates the Perfect Plastic Part

So you need custom molded plastic parts. Maybe it’s for a marine engine application. Maybe it’s plastic injection molded parts for medium or heavy trucks. Or maybe it’s molded plastic […]

Posted May 31st - RL Hudson

Predicting Product Performance with FEA

FEA helps us shorten the design process and save customers money. From the beginning, engineering has concerned itself with making sure that a product or structure won’t fail in service […]

Posted August 18th - RL Hudson

Plastics Overview: From History to Molding Advice for your Custom Plastic Parts

Posted January 28th - RL Hudson

Plastic — in today’s world, it’s just about everywhere. Items we come into contact with on a daily basis, from smartphones to SmartWater bottles, make plastic ubiquitous. Sure, you may not love plastic, but the truth is, like phones and water, plastic is essential in the modern world.  

Just look at the plastic parts that keep vehicles running: RL Hudson designs and manufactures a wide variety of plastic injection molded parts for medium/heavy trucks, and even provides product design and engineering for custom molded plastic engine parts. These custom plastic parts are essential not only to keep the medium/heavy trucks running but also to the companies who rely on them to keep business humming.

In reality, businesses around the globe need quick turnaround time plastic parts, and that’s where we create value as a top manufacturer of custom plastic parts. However, let’s take a step back. What is plastic? What is its history, and what’s the deal with elastomers? Continue reading and you’ll discover the answers to these questions and learn all about classifications, material profiles and plastic molding, as well.

What is plastic material?

Plastics are polymeric materials. That means they are composed of long chains of repeating molecules known as atoms. “Plastic” is a general term that refers to the wide range of mostly synthetic (or semi-synthetic) materials that can be formed into useful products. In fact, the term “plastic” derives from the Greek root plastikos meaning “to form”.  To shed additional light on the etymological significance, “plasticity” refers to the ability to be shaped into a variety of objects.

A history of plastics

Today, RL Hudson manufactures molded plastic parts for high-temperature applications, plastic assemblies, and even provides rapid prototyping services for product design. But how did plastics arrive here?

The modern synthetic version of plastic has been around for over 100 years. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century. In 1863, a New York billiard supply company was facing a shortage of the ivory they used to make billiard balls. They offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could find an alternative for their products. A young printer named John Hyatt decided to give it a shot.

Experimenting with cellulose nitrate, a recently discovered material, Hyatt found he could create a more useful, moldable substance by adding camphor. It came to be known as celluloid. Although celluloid wasn’t great for billiard balls, it made excellent hair combs. Hyatt’s materials created an entire industry of hair comb manufacturing. Later, celluloid was used to make photographic film, as well as the sunglasses popularized by movie stars whose faces were immortalized on celluloid.  

You can see plastics have come a long way. Today, there are a wide variety of plastic products that can be made from injection molding and other methods. We’ll discuss both plastic materials and molding later, after a discussion about elastomers and classifications.

What’s the difference between plastics and elastomers?

Many wonder about the difference between plastics and elastomers. At RL Hudson, we manufacture a wide variety of custom molded products and seals. These are molded from rubber compounds with specific resilience properties suitable for a given application. Such compounds take specific elastomers, like nitrile or silicone, as their primary ingredient. In reality, these elastomers are just polymers, long chains of repeating molecules composed of atoms like carbon and hydrogen. And for this reason, elastomers are known as polymeric materials (remember, plastics are polymeric materials, too).

The main difference between plastics and elastomers is how they respond to heat. Typically, heated elastomers undergo a chemical reaction known as vulcanization. This reaction results in the formation of permanent connections, known as cross-links, between the long molecular chains. Think of these cross-links as chemical bridges that give cured elastomers three-dimensional structures and allow them to be formed into specific shapes, such as O-rings or shaft seal lips. Since such custom parts cannot be remelted, many elastomers are great examples of thermoset plastics.

On the other hand, plastics undergo a physical change when heated, but these changes are reversible, and no permanent chemical curing occurs. Plastics often begin in pellet form, then become softer and more fluid as heat increases. This fluidity allows them to be shaped in a variety of ways, including through extrusion, calendaring, injection molding, and blow molding. As they cool, plastics harden but no chemical-crosslinking occurs. The changes are purely physical and, with the reapplication of heat, reversible. Because they retain the ability to be reshaped using heat, many plastics are referred to as thermoplastic materials.  

But remember: the distinction between elastomers and plastics described here is based on responses to heat. While generally true and useful to remember, be aware there are such things as thermosetting plastics and, conversely, thermoplastic elastomers. All of that to say, “nothing is absolute”. Today, our plastic injection molded parts end up in marine engines, facilitate fluid transportation, involve plastic assemblies and more. So, when you partner with our talented team of engineers, we’ll deliver plastic molding success.

How plastics are classified

Now that we’ve delineated between plastics and elastomers, let’s talk about how plastics are classified. Plastics offer a seemingly endless array of opportunities when it comes to design. Today, there are over four dozen basic types of plastic. When compounded and otherwise manipulated, these types of plastic can result in tens of thousands of distinct and quite frankly very useful materials.

These plastic materials are sometimes classified according to the ways in which their constituent molecules are arranged. Plastics containing very well organized, dense arrangements of molecules are often referred to as crystalline. Plastics containing some organized molecule alignments as well as some random arrangements are known as semi-crystalline. And plastics in which the molecular arrangement is entirely random are called amorphous.

A given plastic’s degree of crystallization can have a big impact on its physical properties (with more crystallization typically adding rigidity). The degree of crystallization can also affect a plastics visual aspect, such as how it looks and responds to light, and plastics can be classified according to their light transmitting properties. Transparent plastic is one through which you can see. You cannot see through a translucent plastic, though light will still pass through the material. An opaque plastic allows for the passage of neither sight nor light.

From a chemical point of view, molecular-based classifications are fascinating due to their relation to material performance. After all, that’s what matters most, right? Fortunately, plastic materials can also be classified according to their mechanical, chemical, thermal and electrical properties. Three general classifications are in use today: commodity plastics, engineering plastics and high-performance plastics.

Commodity plastics are the low-end types and are typically used for high-volume disposable products where low cost is a priority. Engineering plastics are the next step up and are used for parts requiring a better range of properties, including greater durability. And, as the name implies, high-performance plastics are the high-end types. High-performance plastics are used for applications requiring excellent mechanical, chemical, thermal, and/or electrical attributes. At RL Hudson, our in-house engineers are very experienced with a wide range of plastics, especially engineering and high-performance plastics.

That’s why our products end up in applications around the globe where performance and reliability are paramount. Whether it’s plastic part design for injection molding or rapid manufacturing for plastic injected molded plastic parts, we can bring your project to the next level. With that, let’s turn our attention plastic material profiles.

Material profiles for custom molded plastic parts

When it comes to material profiles, nylon is a great example of an engineering plastic. As mentioned earlier, many polymers are composed of repeating carbon and hydrogen atoms; nylon also contains nitrogen and oxygen within its chemical structure. Often designed by the letters PA (for polyamide fiber), nylon was introduced back in the late 1930s and has since found wide acceptance due to its great strength and durability. Known by many trade names, nylon can be blended with other materials like minerals or glass to further augment strength, dimensional stability, and heat resistance. For example, our engineers recently used a glass-filled nylon compound to replace what had been a metal part for an engine application, and this resulted in significant cost savings for the customer. That’s because metal to plastic conversions for weight consideration is just one service we offer to create value as a top manufacturer of custom plastic parts.

Take polytetrafluoroethylene, for example. This material often serves as the basis for extremely useful high-performance plastics. Sometimes called PTFE but known most widely by the DuPont trade name Teflon, polytetrafluoroethylene features fluorine atoms within its chemical structure. These fluorine atoms are strongly bonded to carbon atoms, making the material extremely resistant to chemical breakdown. PFTE also functions well across a wide temperature range. As a result, PTFE parts are often used in aggressive chemical and thermal environments that would break down lesser materials.

These are just a couple of plastics we use regularly. We also have wide experience designing custom plastic parts and components made from acetal, acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), polycarbonate (PC), polypropylene (PP), polyetheretherketone (PEEK), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), and many other plastics.

Molding advice for custom plastic parts

Of course, good plastic materials must still be properly molded to be truly useful. Many of the plastic parts our engineers design are injection molded. Injection molding is so-named because plastic pellets are melted and injected under pressure from a heating chamber through a sprue, runner and gate system into closed molded cavities. Once filled and cooled, the mold is opened and the part removed.

Once our engineers have designed a part and selected a material, we utilize a mold flow analysis (MFA) program to spotlight any potential molding glitches. The MFA program works to predict how a material will flow into a mold cavity under variable conditions. These variables include temperature, pressure and gate and runner size and location. The ability to anticipate molding performance saves you time that would otherwise be lost awaiting factory evaluation of a design.

We are here to bring success to your next project requiring custom molded plastic components. Whether it’s multiple component assemblies for plastic parts or product design and engineering for plastic parts, our experience and capabilities mean success in your next endeavor.

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