Baytech Plastics continues to assist customers in choosing alternatives to traditional steel tooling and has developed tooling sources in both domestic and offshore suppliers.
Baytech Plastics has been a long term advocate of aluminum tooling vs traditional steel in high production applications. Aluminum, once only considered for prototype applications has a much broader application. Baytech has built aluminum molds for a variety of markets including automotive, business machine and consumer products. We have over 15 years of successful programs running aluminum tooling in high volume applications.
The benefits of aluminum are pretty straight forward, lower cost of tooling and cycle time advantage from better thermal heat transfer. A reduced cycle time of 20% or more drives down the part cost, increases efficiency and creates capacity on the molding equipment. Customers always appreciate lower part costs and lower capital cost of tooling.
There are choices in aluminum materials QC7, QC 10, and 7000 series, to name a few.
It is important to understand that not all resins are a perfect fit with the use of aluminum molds and we consider steel when the application involves using glass filled and polycarbonate resins.
We have built hybrid tooling using aluminum cavities/cores and steel inserts in areas for wear consideration and gating maintenance. We find little restriction with the use of specialized coatings if specified. The use of valve gates can be integrated with confidence.
Baytech Plastics operates 37 molding machines 7 days a week from 2 plants in Midland Ontario serving the automotive, recreational vehicle, heavy truck, business machine and consumer white goods markets.