Any plastics manufacturers on here?

[ingelow]

Morning folks,

I'm looking to potentially make a selection of our own storage products, including clear plastic boxes, bins, containers (some for food, others not) etc. We currently order from a variety of providers, none are quite what we want, and often involve shipping from overseas, or long waits and I'd like to see if we can a) source from the UK, and b) get something a little closer to what we need.

Before I get into the usual google, I just thought I'd ask if there was anyone on here who either works in that line, or knows a bit about it, could chat through costs, volumes, etc.

Cheers!

[996Type]

Hi,

There’s a company in Castleford called “Really Useful Box” manufacture on site from raw materials. The place is huge, so the processes at scale I expect maybe complex, but it might be worth taking to them about specials?

[pete_esp]

I've spoken with Mclaren Plastics near Edinburgh and found them to be very helpful, give them a shout as I saw them manufacturing things similar to what you described when they showed me around there facility

[ingelow]

996Type said:

Hi,

There’s a company in Castleford called “Really Useful Box” manufacture on site from raw materials. The place is huge, so the processes at scale I expect maybe complex, but it might be worth taking to them about specials?

Thanks, will give them a shout - their stuff looks quite "in-house" style, but can't hurt to ask

[ingelow]

pete_esp said:

I've spoken with Mclaren Plastics near Edinburgh and found them to be very helpful, give them a shout as I saw them manufacturing things similar to what you described when they showed me around there facility

Thanks, will give them a look - looks like they're happy to get into the tooling too, which I think we'll need. Appreciate your help 👍

[Fusion777]

Try and find a decent local injection moulding business that maybe makes similar things at present. Don't know how well up you are on the design process, but it's a lot cheaper to have the mould tools designed/made in China. Of course you'd need CAD models of the product designs you want.

[DSLiverpool]

20 years ago my life was selling injection moulding and toolmaking.

Finding a moulder won’t be an issue but finding a designer to make a suite of tools that are cost efficient for the variations will be harder.

I’d look for a UK designer that will liaise with the toolmaker - a bit like an architect. Also look at machine size required as a huge jump from a 250 upwards.

For info a meal prep chap needed a suite of containers and we ended up in glass from China with local lids (as customised logo embossed on them)

[ingelow]

Thanks all, really helpful - very much appreciated and a bit more to think about over the weekend

re: CAD requirements (will find out I suppose on Monday when I start calling round), can I just knock it up in sketchup or equivalent, or is there a favoured product for something like this? Have done similar stuff years ago, but wondering if the world has moved on a bit since then.

re: the machine size, we're probably looking at 30-50cm cube max volume, maybe a bit larger, but yes variations, which will make life expensive I'm guessing - not sure if that's crazy expensive or not?

re: china for glass - having done some stuff with alibaba wholesale, I'm still not 100% we're experienced enough to get the quality we'd want (we're running a few smaller scale experiments for other items), but I'm also dubious on the overall cost of shipping with the FX rate - it's had a pretty drastic effect on margins of some stuff we've shipped (and the cost of shipping), so I'm wondering if it's near enough the same in the UK, I'd rather do that for eco reasons if nothing else.

sorry, one more - I'm wondering about min volumes per variation - for something not super intricate (nice clear PET boxes with / without lids etc.), does anyone know of the volumes required to be commercially sensible / is there a rule of thumb?

Cheers!

Edited by ingelow on Saturday 11th February 18:53

[Fusion777]

Normally STEP files are used for the CAD. There are lot of ways of doing it- some firms get the mould tool manufacturer to design the tool based on CAD of the product, some firms do the mould tool design in house, some firms probably get a tool designer to pass the design onto the tool manufacturer as another poster mentioned.

Depends on your in house capabilities. Sketchup is probably fine for doing concepts/proposals, but a designer will use something like Solidworks/Catia/NX/pick your pro CAD program of choice.

[RC1807]

Just saw this... a mate of mine owns this company: https://www.displaysuk.co.uk
Based in Christchurch, Dorset, but sells and delivers all over the place.