Lot Number Printing By Minnesota Rubber & Plastics On Custom Molded Rubber Parts Facilitates Part Traceability, Enhances Quality Programs

Minneapolis, Minnesota: For certain specific applications custom molded rubber parts are available from Minnesota Rubber & Plastics with wear resistant numbers and codes printed on them for fast and easy lot and batch traceability.

Minnesota Rubber & Plastics' lot number printing is a secondary operation designed to eliminate the need for complicated paper trails involving large part runs of a million or more critical elastomeric components. Such high volume part runs may require as many as 10,000 or more different batch numbers.

Minnesota Rubber & Plastics points out that batch traceability is increasingly important for maintaining quality programs where assembly is done by second or third tier suppliers in more than one plant location such as in the automotive, plumbing and appliance industries.

Utilizing high speed ink jet printers designed specifically for elastomeric part printing identification, Minnesota Rubber & Plastics has the capability of imprinting hundreds of small components and/or thousands of feet of rubber material surface each minute. Some, but not all, parts lend themselves to this process, which is very flexible and can be adapted to a customer/industry's particular needs. For example, the system can print any combination of alpha numeric numbers, symbols, bar codes and detailed manufacturing information on parts if needed.

The printed image itself is very durable with excellent service life. The image won't easily rub or wear off. A minimal amount of special translucent ink is utilized which is non-contaminating and won't degrade the elastomer part material making it superior to "painted on" part identification.

Minnesota Rubber & Plastics provides complete rubber and thermoplastic manufacturing in five North American facilities plus European and Asia Pacific manufacturing locations. Services include comprehensive design, materials engineering, rapid mold design, prototype development, process engineering, injection, compression, transfer and liquid silicone rubber manufacturing including metal to plastic conversions.