DECORATION | TECHNOLOGY
Creating a lasting impression
Decoration of moulded products has never been more prominent, not just in packaging, but also automotive and other sectors. Mark Holmes reviews the latest developments in laser marking, IMD and IML
Giving customers options is the main requirement of suppliers of printing and decorating technologies for the injection moulding industry, according to Mike Kilgore, Vice-President of Marketing & Sales at Wisconsin Plastics Inc (WPI). “No matter how parts can be decorated – pad printing, hot stamping, labels or direct colour printing – customers want their products to stand out beyond the base design,” he says. “Product customisation is increasingly impor- tant, with customers demanding something unique, such as different colours, corporate logos or textures. Consumers are becoming pickier about retail products. Everybody wants to be unique. If you look at smart phone cases, people want to have theirs be different than the next person’s. That is not easy to do with a commodity product.” These new customer demands have led the US
group to add new technology to the established decoration processes such as pad printing. “We have now implemented direct to substrate printing, which allows us to print in full colour
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photo quality from a data file. We have also established hydro graphics printing in-house. This allows us to place a graphic on the surface of a part, no matter what its shape is. The qualification is longer with this process, because the part colour is important,” he says. And there are other finishes WPI can apply to injection moulded products. It has developed a process for plating plastics to provide a brushed stainless steel surface. “This process is a combina- tion of the moulded part having a specific surface preparation, plating it with stainless-steel, and then applying a top coat for durability. The result is a part that typically cannot be stamped in true stainless-steel due to the complex part geometry. However, this can be achieved in a moulded part.”
Laser marking According to FOBA Laser Marking+Engraving, part of Alltec in Germany, there are currently two main trends in laser-based decoration for injection
September 2017 | INJECTION WORLD 49
Main image: The DecoJect technology produces decoration and textures using an in-mould process
PHOTO: BENECKE-KALIKO
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