4 Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic (FRP) headaches you can solve to make your job easier.
FRP was, and still is, a staple composite product since its inception in the 40’s. While it is a practical material with a with a very good strength-to-weight ratio, it has seen very little technological improvements since the last century.
It is what it is.
A strong, yet heavy and labor intensive process with limited flexibility outside its core characteristics.
Headache #1 – Bracketry
In order to mount FRP parts to a frame or reinforce weak areas, bracketry is required. Steel or aluminum brackets need to be sourced, designed and manually affixed. All of this adds weight, time and cost to any project.
Consider the fact that you can eliminate the need for bracketry altogether.
If you want the strength of FRP, without its weight and the need for bracketry, consider Long Fiber Injection. LFI allows for B-side features. Ribs can be designed into the part to help support weak or less stiff areas. Bosses and inserts can also be designed into the part to allow for a direct mount.
Headache #2 – Time and Inconsistency
You just received the FRP parts from your supplier…late. And when you inspect them, they are not to tolerance. As you know, FRP parts are made by hand. Human error will happen and that causes inconsistency from part to part.
The answer is to automate and remove the manual labor.
LFI does exactly this. Polyurethane and chopped glass is robotically sprayed into an open mold and then closed with heat and compression to form a part. And it can do this in minutes. The part is near net when it leaves the mold minutes later.
Headache #3 – Paint
If only FRP parts didn’t need to be painted or bonded, you might have received them a week earlier.
To paint or bond an FRP part, sanding is required. And sanding can cause dust to enter its porous surface, making both paint adhesion and bonding difficult.
Not only does it require more time and labor to the already slow FRP process, but it inherently causes difficulty to paint or bond.
What if there was a process that didn’t require sanding to paint and was easy to bond together?
There is. Again, Long Fiber Injection can provide a clean, painted part directly out of the mold.
Headache #4 – Multiple parts, multiple sizes
If you have a series of parts that need to be produced in various sizes in your project, it can get expensive very quickly to create multiple molds for each part and size.
There’s an answer to that as well. With the use of a family mold, Long Fiber Injection allows for multiple cavities of various sizes to make your parts more economically feasible.
What’s more is that with Romeo RIM’s advanced trimming operations, we can trim parts to different lengths or widths within the same cavity.
If you have experienced any of these headaches, do yourself a favor, grab and aspirin and check out how Long Fiber Injection can improve your project.
