Adhesive Bonding vs. Mechanical Fastening in Product Design: The Pros and Cons
When cooking up their next great product, designers and manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to produce the highest-performing products while keeping assembly and materials costs low.
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Top Challenges Product Development Teams Experience When Bringing a Product Concept to Manufacturing
Modern product development is fraught with challenges due in large part to the sophistication and complexity of the various elements that go into a final product – everything from materials and surface geometries to coatings, bonding, and even staff skills and competencies. Pitfalls await even the...
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How to Avoid Polymeric Coating Failure Which Leads to Corrosion in Materials
We know that plastics are in nearly everything these days, but we don’t often think about how plastics are also on nearly everything. Polymer coatings are as common as the latex paint covering the walls of your house. For industrial use, polymeric coatings have been protecting and beautifying...
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Surface Energy Measurement is the Key to Process Control and High Performance
When manufacturing companies take adhesion seriously it can have a remarkable effect on their ability to achieve their business goals. The key is to take a strategic look at adhesion processes early in product development. Glues, epoxies, coatings and other adhesives are coming alongside or...
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Why You Should Use Predictive Data in Building Material Manufacturing
Construction companies and the manufacturers who build the parts and materials that create buildings are relying on adhesives more than ever. When it comes to modern flooring, roofing, siding, windows and wall construction, to make sure the outside stays out and the inside stays warm/cool/dry,...
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Maintaining Consistent Adhesion Quality for Shoe Manufacturers even with Material Changes
There are a lot of reasons why sneakerheads love the shoes they covet. Athletic shoes have become one of the most sought after clothing items due to their aesthetic appeal but also because of the ever-evolving material innovations of shoe manufacturers. Shoes were once ubiquitously leather or firm...
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Better Consumer Electronics Reliability: Coatings and Adhesives
In a recent study conducted by Instrumental, the top ten most common manufacturing defects were examined. The number one defect that manufacturers fight against is a deficiency in glue. It’s a simple fact that electronic products are relying on adhesive bonding far more than mechanical fasteners in...
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Everything Breaks: What Reliability Means for Adhesively Bonded Products
The seemingly easy and obvious answer to the question implied in the title of this article is: reliability means no failures whatsoever forever and ever, amen. Sadly, it’s not quite so simple. For manufacturing engineers, reliability is an elastic concept that is particular to each and every design.
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The Huge Need for Zero Defect, Large Scale Molding Processes
Manufacturing large scale molded products such as pools, boats and aircraft parts is as herculean a process as the products they generate. Colossal molds are used to form fiberglass and other composites into aircraft wing panels, fuselages, boat hulls, bus shells and pools. The proper application,...
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Process Control Innovations for Card Manufacturers
We’ve all experienced the disappointing (and kinda embarrassing) moment when we’re at a register trying to buy armfuls of tortilla chips and salsa, and the point-of-sale card reader screams out that an error has occurred. For credit and debit card manufacturers, these are the moments they want to...
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Ensuring the Durability of Oleophobic Coatings on Consumer Tech
We’re all thinking a lot more about the surfaces we touch and the invisible things that might be on those surfaces. Manufacturers have been thinking about how surfaces interact with our skin and the environment long before COVID-19 made us all much more cognizant of what we can get from touching...
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How to Control Surface Quality for Bonding Dissimilar Materials
We’ve mentioned many times, in various articles, that bonded material systems are becoming the norm for manufacturers in nearly every industry. In order to make finished products more efficient in terms of weight, to cut material costs, to accommodate more automated processes, to lessen the need of...
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Coatings on Car Sensors and Why We Don’t Have Driverless Cars Yet
Our relationship to our vehicles may have changed in the past few months with the idea of commuting to work looking more like a shuffle to the desk across the room rather than a drive to the office across town. However, cars have not dropped from their prominence in our society. With health risks...
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Demystifying the Greatest Metal Brazing Process Challenges
When thinking about what manufacturing looks like, most people envision sparks flying, metal clanking and fires blazing. This isn’t too far off the mark since metals have been used for bonding joints together to build larger, sturdier and more stable structures since before the first Industrial...
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How to Get the Most Out of Your Vacuum Plasma Treatment
Vacuum plasma is the treatment method of record for many manufacturers. Not only because it is a legacy technology proven useful over many, many decades, but because it can be particularly effective at creating chemically reactive surfaces of various geometries that need to be bonded, coated,...
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Deck the Hulls: Preparing Ship Hulls for Coating and Painting
Manufacturing a product to withstand the environmental stresses of wind, rain, and sediment is challenging enough. But, when you add saltwater and wave action to the mix, the detrimental threat of corrosion increases significantly. A coating adhesion test is important for quickly testing a surface...
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Teflon: More Than Just Pots and Pans
Teflon is a household name that commonly invokes images of eggs sizzling on a skillet, spatulas flipping pancakes, or rice steaming in a pan. But, there is much more to this magical non-stick coating. Teflon, a brand name for PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene), prohibits food from sticking to pots...
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