Norck, a leading digital manufacturing company, provides extremely reliable, top quality, and fast manufacturing of parts with liquid silicone rubber molding for a wide range of industries including aerospace, defense, robotics, industrial, automotive, electronics, energy, hardware, and consumer products. Our team of highly qualified engineers and cutting-edge facilities will provide you with quality products with the quickest turnaround time at a competitive price. Whether you have high volume production projects or rapid protototyping needs, Norck can manage it with the results better than expectations.

Click here to get a quote for your next injection molding job and liquid silicone rubber molding needs.

Let’s now give you some insight how Norck manufactures parts with liquid silicone rubber molding.

It is a rubber molding process that injects rubber into a mold to form the desired shapes. Mold is made from hardened steel and contains the body of the part to be molded. The liquid silicone rubber molding process is used for high and medium-volume production.

Liquid silicone rubber molding offers many advantages:

• Flexible parts: Since the material is silicone.
• Flexible design: The design rules are not as strict as injection molding of thermoplastics.
• No sink marks: Even when there are different thicknesses, silicone parts will not present sink marks.
• Undercuts are acceptable to a degree: Due to the material's flexibility, undercuts are acceptable.
• Resistant against chemicals
• Costs less than injection molding

But there are some disadvantages as well:

   -  Complex tooling: Two barrels, a static mixer, etc., makes the tooling more complex.
   -  Longer cycle time: LSR would take more time to finish a cycle
   -  Less accurate tolerances: Due to the material's flexibility, the silicone parts don't have accurate dimensions as a thermoplastic injection molding part.

Like in injection molding, Liquid Silicone Rubber is injected into a mold to form the desired shape, but with minor differences:

1. Mixing materials: The injected material is composed of two substances, which get mixed in a mixing chamber before being injected. The liquid silicone rubber runs cool to prevent the rubber from curing. While the liquid injection molding requires a low pressure (<1000PSI), the required pressure for LSR is between 1450 to 14500 PSI.

2. Injection: The mold is closed, and the screw will advance to increase pressure in the injection chamber and inject the mixed liquid silicone into the mold. The clamped cavities are heated to cure the liquid silicone and are maintained close until the solution solidifies.

3. Heating: After injection, the silicone will be heated to become solid.

4. Ejection: The Die is opened, and the part is ejected manually or automatically.

Obtaining a fully functional part might require extra processing for features that can't be made with the Injection molding process, such as taping. The designed part should follow injection molding design guidelines.

Norck, a leading manufacturing company driven by technology, high quality data and artificial intelligence, focuses on manufacturing excellent quality of sheet metal parts, custom parts and components, a wide range of 3D printed parts and moldings. It is a single source for a wide of range of companies around the world for their need of sheet metal fabrication, CNC machining, 3D printing, and molding. 

Besides its own production capacity, Norck’s ability access to a huge amount of manufacturing capacity of its top quality partners across Europe and the U.S allows it to provide its customers with low and high volume production, rapid prototyping and a wide range of manufacturing services from sheet metal fabrication to 3D printing.

Norck’s data-driven AI approach to manufacturing maximizes its overall product and service quality, while minimizing the overall cost of its parts and services. This leads to high quality products, better inventory programs for our customers worldwide, better visibility for supply chain management.

Norck’s team of manufacturing engineers, mechnical engineers, quality engineers, supply chain engineers, industrial designers, artificial intelligence engineers, data scientists, and software application developers work in a unique and coherent way to provide your company with high quality manufacturing parts and services, better design for manufacturability and all driven by data and artificial intelligence.

As a single source for all your manufacturing needs, Norck minimizes your overhead cost, diversifies your supply chain, improves your parts’ design for manufacturability, significantly improves the quality of services and parts you outsource, minimizes suppliers’ risks, improves your purchasing power, and provides the goods and services with a philosophy of just in time.