The Right Color can be critical

Having the right color part is very important to many of our customers. Color is especially important for consumer products, but many industrial and military products must have specific and consistent color as well. Having the right color may be functional, or it may reinforce the appearance of a quality product.

Custom Color Matching

Most thermoplastic injection molding materials are stocked in black or “natural.” The natural color may be white, off-white, translucent, or yellow depending on the material. Even if an application does not need a specific color, many natural color resins look unattractive to the point where a custom color match is warranted.

To color a thermoplastic injection molding material, Rebling Plastics purchases color concentrate in pellet form. The color concentrate pellets are a similar size and shape to the thermoplastic injection molding materials. In many cases, we can buy inexpensive stock color concentrates in small quantities that can be used with specific resins. In other cases, our customers may request a FED STD 595 or pantone color matching. We can get a color matching of any color in most materials, even based on just a sample part.

When dealing with color concentrates, it is important to use a proper base resin. Color concentrate is normally added at a rate of 100:1 to 25:1 depending on the color and material. We work with our color concentrate suppliers to choose a base resin that will not significantly change the properties of our molding material. With less common materials, this usually means that we send some of our material stock out to have it made into color concentrate.

Thermosets

With thermoset materials, the options are much more limited. Many of the thermoset materials we use may be produced in black, brown, green, and blue. Most do not even have that many options, and some are only available in black. While color matching may be possible with these materials, there is usually a minimum of tens of thousands of pounds to make that happen at great expense.