Rubber – metal part seems perfect on room temperature after production, but during operating conditions it contacts oil and the angular seals are loosing the sharp edges, so the seal is imperfect.
With the method of reverse engineering we have developed a compound, which reaches its final form when it is in contact with oil, so the perfect seal is granted during operation.
In our example rubber is molded on a long metal part. Because of the high temperature molding process shrinkage is present on the centre of the part, so it measures bigger on the sides. This results to an uneven and unwanted shape.
By machining the metal parts to be convex, we can minimize the effects of the shrinkage. By changing technology to RTV silicone we can insure the lowest possible shrinkage and create very precise products.
Compression molded parts have a partition line at the outside. In this case the rubber part had to seal with its outer surface, but the seal was not perfect by the partition line.
Luckily, the diameter to wall thickness ratio was beneficial for us. We molded the part the inside surface out and twisted afterwards, so the partition lines moved to the inner surface, and outer surface insured a perfect seal.
In this case a Tier 2 automotive OEM supplier had a product range of similar compression molded products, but form hundreds of variations. The estimated tooling cost to cover these large number of molds was very high.
We have designed a universally variable mold for this specific product range. By the usage of tool inserts length, width and height can be modified. By designing one clever mold we avoided the investment into hundreds of similar molds.
Silicone tubes were installed in an animal feeding system. It was not possible to visually check the food flowing through the tubes. It may happen that any unwanted material is present in the feeding system which should not reach the animals.
We have developed a platina cured silicone, which was fully transparent. This way the operators could continuously check the quality of the food in the tubes.
