What Is Rubber Molding And The Process to Make Rubber Molded Parts

2024-03-28 16:14:10
What’s Rubber Molding?

Rubber molding refers to the process of processing rubber materials into the required rubber products through certain methods, such as extrusion, injection molding, pressing, and other molding processes. This technique is integral to producing components with precision, capable of forming complex shapes and designs with outstanding durability. Rubber molding is crucial in sectors where precision and material resilience are important, such as automotive and healthcare.

Different Types of Rubber Molding Process

Extrusion molding
Extrusion molding is to extrude heated and softened rubber through a template of a certain shape into a product with a strip, tube or special-shaped cross-section. The extrusion molding process is simple and the product quality is stable. It can produce longer-length products, such as sealing strips, pipes, etc.
The advantages of extrusion molding are high production efficiency, high precision of finished products, and the ability of mass producing. The disadvantage is that it has high requirements on the shape of the template, and bubbles and lines are prone to occur during the production process.
Compression molding
Compression molding is a method in which the processed rubber is placed into a mold and heated and vulcanized to form the rubber in the mold. Compression molding can produce products of various shapes and sizes with high appearance precision and high yield, such as seals, O-rings, etc. The advantages of compression molding are that the products produced have complex shapes, high dimensional accuracy, stable performance, and relatively low cost. The disadvantage is that production efficiency is low and it is only suitable for producing small production.
Injection molding
Injection molding is to inject heated and softened rubber into a mold through an injection molding machine, and then cool and solidify to obtain the product. This method can be used to produce small, precision rubber products, such as gaskets, sound insulation pads, etc.
The advantages of injection molding are high production efficiency, high precision of finished products, and low cost. The disadvantage is that it has high requirements on molds, the wall thickness of the product is difficult to adjust, and it is not suitable for the production of large-size or thick-walled products.

Application
Rubber products are widely used in automobiles, machinery, electronics, chemicals, aerospace and other fields. Automobile and machinery manufacturing are the main areas where rubber products are used, such as automobile tires, seals, rubber tubes, etc. In the electronic industry, rubber products are mainly used for shockproof, waterproof and other aspects.