White goods plinth product review saves cost and improves product
15 December 2017
The term ‘angel hair’ has many meanings if Googled, but in manufacturing, it relates to the hair-like strands of glue which sometimes occur in a manual gluing process. For a leading white goods manufacturer, angel hair was proving a big problem - especially when the goods were not white!
Angel hair only shows up when sprayed products are dry
This was a real problem for the white goods manufacturer, and they approached Tex Plastics to explore possible solutions. One solution would be to mould the product in the coloured plastic to the finished specification, but this was not an option the client would consider. This meant the angel hair issue could only be resolved if the gluing process was an automated procedure.
An automated gluing process was adopted
Moving to an automated process enabled the Tex Plastics technical team to explore different glues, and to experiment with a specified repeatable dose. This guaranteed the angel hair issue was resolved as the new glue solution wasn’t ‘stringy.’
Additional benefits identified improved the plinth design further
In exploring the challenges of the angel hair, Tex Plastics design team discovered the gluing process was for a snap-fitting, and this had also caused the manufacturer issues. The plastic moulded ‘snap-fit’ component on the plinth wasn’t flexible, and once in place became ‘stretched’ and the plinth became loose. A material change delivered more flexibility with a ’snap-fit’ memory, which provided a more secure fix when in place but could still be easily removed as and when required.