The Art and Science of Custom Rubber Molding Services

by | May 22, 2024 | Company Culture, Manufacturing, Panova, Rubber

Manufacturing today’s custom molded rubber products is a complex process that demands a unique breadth of expertise at every step of production. From design for manufacturability and prototyping to establishing an efficient, sustainable production strategy, Panova goes above and beyond to ensure the ongoing success of your project.

Choosing the Right Rubber Molding Company for the Job

Choosing a rubber molding company that provides a complete range of services goes a lot further than simply streamlining your overall project.

At Panova, our integrated product development, prototyping, and full-scale manufacturing solutions can also help improve your end products and potentially reduce your costs by facilitating a leaner manufacturing process. Our integration of services also facilitates a more robust and consistent in-house quality control process.

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, your products need every advantage they can come by. Rising to that challenge, Panova offers much more than a means to manufacture custom molded rubber components. We help further establish the long-term success of your project by building your products better, leaner, more efficiently, and more sustainably.

What goes into manufacturing your custom molded rubber products?

Choosing the Right Molding Process for Your Parts

Before we can optimize your product design and begin further production planning, we have to select the optimal rubber molding process for your unique parts. By offering numerous rubber molding services, Panova can efficiently manufacture the widest range of product types possible.

  • Compression Molding – Utilizing quality heat-cured, high-consistency rubber (HCR) materials, we are able to produce virtually any custom rubber components while maintaining the utmost in quality and consistency. Our compression molding services are especially optimal for low- to mid-volume projects due to the reduced cost of the tooling compared to other molding processes.
  • Transfer Molding – Transfer molding requires more complex tooling compared to compression molding, and therefore typically carries higher upfront costs. However, that’s because transfer molding services are also better for manufacturing more complex custom rubber parts – such as those with high cavity counts, or designs requiring clean, sharp edges.
  • Injection Molding – Our rubber injection molding services can also tackle highly customized molded rubber products with difficult-to-produce designs and geometries. Along with liquid injection molding, our conventional injection molding process offers reduced cure times which more effectively accommodates high-volume production runs. The injection molding process is also extremely flexible, precise, and repeatable, making it the go-to manufacturing solution for many of today’s more complex rubber products.

Design for Manufacturability

When we help optimize your products for manufacturability, we design each component in such a way that simplifies the manufacturing process, facilitates better production quality and consistency, and minimizes material usage where possible. All of these advantages can potentially lower your overall costs while making your project leaner, greener, and more sustainable.

At Panova, our design for manufacturability solutions include many unique considerations such as optimal material selection, part geometry, thicknesses and tolerances, as well as surface finish requirements. The end result is inevitably a more efficient product design for the chosen production process.

Custom Prototyping Solutions

Once we’ve arrived at a finalized product design, we can move onto custom prototyping for projects that require it. Panova’s integrated prototyping services include 3D-printed samples in a variety of materials and durometers to effectively simulate the end product.

We can provide functional mock-ups from a combination of different manufacturing processes, including samples from prototype tooling using the proposed production manufacturing process so that you can be sure of the end results. We are also able to build form, fit, and function samples to give you a real-world feel for the proposed design before committing it.

Transitioning into Full-Scale Manufacturing

Panova’s integrated product development and prototyping services combined with our multiple molding options offer your project a streamlined path to full-scale production.

Quality Custom Rubber Molding Services Since 1977

Panova has provided quality rubber molded products to OEMs, parts distributors, and suppliers throughout the world since 1977. We have continually expanded our rubber molding capabilities to provide our customers with more flexible, efficient, and sustainable solutions.