Plastic products are so common nowadays that you can find products made via plastic in nearly every store you walk into. Walk down the electronics aisle of any retail store and you are bound to find USB drives, memory cards, webcams, headphones, speakers, etc all made from plastic. Usually these products are all made [...]
Why not steel or aluminum? Metal materials such as steel, aluminum and others have been used for years in many different industries. Each of these materials has its strengths but these strengths come at a cost. Thus, I thought it would make sense to type up a little series of blog post showing some [...]
Let’s talk textures. Texture is an area in which thermoformed products have a distinct advantage over many other plastic processes such as injection molding, rotational molding, blow molding, etc. Unlike fiberglass and the aforementioned plastic processes, thermoformed (or vacuum formed) parts which require a texture don’t pick up this texture from the mold surface. The [...]
At Arrowhead Plastic Engineering, we operate 2 separate facilities in east-central Indiana. One plant specializes in fiberglass composites and the other plant thermoforms plastic parts. We are often asked, "What's the difference between the two." That's a great question with a complex answer. Fiberglass is what is considered a thermoset composite, whereas Thermoformed Plastic [...]
Customers of Arrowhead Plastic Engineering benefit from decreased lead times and increased precision thanks to the company's five 5-axis CNC routers. All of the CNCs have a 60” x 120” bed. The machines are capable of cutting MDF board, low and high density tooling board, and other advanced tooling materials, giving customers more manufacturing [...]
Quick Summary: By utilizing our FARO Arm, Arrowhead can offer precision custom molded fiberglass and thermoplastic parts to our customers with even the tightest of tolerances. The FARO Arm allows for precision measuring, laser scanning and CAD generation, reverse engineering and physical part to CAD model comparisons. Whether it be measuring tooling for accuracy, [...]
There are many different methods a company can utilize to mold a fiberglass part. Some of these include but are not limited to: hand layup, spray-up, closed cavity bag molding, RTM, RTM lite, compression molding and cold molding. Each process has its own set of unique advantages and disadvantages. When it comes to molding [...]
