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Custom Made Rubber Products that Suit Industrial Applications

14 January 2020

Engineering rubbers have transformed the mining industry. The same can be said for the manufacturing sector and for construction sites. Staying with mining, custom made rubber products make mines more productive. Let’s back up that statement with a few facts. Steel hoppers and screening frames are tough, but they age when exposed to loads of coarse rock. Aggregate materials dent metal, but rubber parts absorb such shock loads.

Installing Custom-Made Mining Components

The mining equipment fitted in modern mineral excavation installations has evolved a great deal over the last three decades. For the most part, the gear used here, the conveyors, hoppers, screens and crushers, are engineered to comply with the tightest known engineering standards. If a certain aggregate load requires a custom-built frame, then a manufacturer provides the system module. The machinery oscillates, it vibrates, but the tightly fitted, precisely die-cut rubber products installed on the equipment stay anchored. The point is, that’s a lot of punishment for all of that alloy-reinforced equipment to take. Saving the day, tailor-formed rubber overlays create a shock-absorbing barrier between the impact load and the steel frames.

Benefitting From Made To Measure Engineering Rubbers

Let’s put it this way, the mining industry can be used as a good example of how metal parts aren’t always application-suitable, but that industry is far from alone. In the food sector, custom made rubber linings prevent fruit from being bruised after they roll off a conveyor line. The material is exposed to fruit acids and moisture, but its specially treated polymer base resists such material weakening influences. If an unsuitable rubber were to be employed here, well, the flexible material would age and quickly wear out. Likewise, a sealing rubber, a material that’s meant to compress then resume its shape when the sealing pressure is removed, would end up as a cracked and broken down mess if the elastomeric medium was poorly sourced.

Temperatures, chemical reactance, pressures, all of these harsh environmental and process-specific effectors can damage a rubber sheet if the material hasn’t been intelligently selected. Finally, to really maximize the output of a top-of-the-line rubber fabrication company, that company can’t simply use an off-the-shelf approach. With industrial and commercial clients in search of products that precisely slot into a given application, special die-cutting machines and cutters are required to create these made-to-fit solutions. If a customer reports an error, such as an overly loose-fitting, then the fabrication shop has to be capable of implementing a reworking system, one that recuts a chosen elastomer until it exactly suits a demanding application area.