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5 Things to Consider when Designing Custom Rubber Molded Parts

Designing and creating custom rubber molded parts requires a careful and thorough process to ensure the final product meets the specific needs and requirements of the customer.

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Railroad Crossing Pads

Railroad crossing pads, also known as track mats or crossing timbers, are thick, durable pieces of material that are used to protect the ground surrounding a railroad crossing. These pads are typically made of wood, rubber, or a combination of the two, and they are used to prevent the ground from becoming damaged by the weight of trains and railroad equipment.

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What is Cast Polyurethane?

Cast polyurethane is a type of polymer that is formed by reacting a polyol with an isocyanate in the presence of a catalyst. The resulting material has a wide range of properties, including high strength, excellent abrasion resistance, and good elasticity. It is also highly resistant to wear, chemicals, and temperature extremes, which makes it an ideal material for use in a variety of applications.

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Capacitor Boots

Can you imagine tossing out a multi-million-dollar industrial system because someone jostled a chipboard a little too hard? Or constantly repairing a fault HVAC model because it’s prone to capacitor overheating? Fortunately, protecting yourself from these issues doesn’t mean rewiring your whole system. In many cases, it’s enough to add a capacitor cap.

Also known as capacitor boots, these little hunks of plastic protect wire terminals from moisture, temperature fluctuations, vibrations, and sudden shocks.

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Irrigation Pipe Gaskets

In agriculture, water is money. Getting the right amount of it where and when it’s needed is tied directly to crop yield and bottom lines. That’s why it’s vital that worn-out gaskets—the number one cause of leaky valves—are replaced as soon as they’re found.. While replacing the valve is easy, finding the part you need and getting it, especially in older systems, can be much harder.

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Screening Panels: Why Modularity and Polyurethane Are a Winning Combination

Traditional wire mesh screens are a nightmare to change. Doing so typically takes three people, a sledgehammer, a crowbar, and a lot of elbow grease. While that switch is happening, your entire operation grinds to a halt. This state of inactivity can persist for what feels like days as technicians fight with worn-out screws and jagged edges. And, in mining more than most industries, time is money. Fortunately, a modular screening panel system makes swapping out broken media less of a nightmare and more of a mild inconvenience.

For more information on why custom-molded polyurethane is the best choice for the mining industry, check out this article.

Polyurethane Acorn Rollers

If you’ve ever harvested potatoes, you know that root crops are a messy business. While getting the vegetable is easy, you must dust off rocks, dirt clumps, and bits of earthworms before you can eat it. This cleaning process is often just as—if not more—strenuous than the harvesting itself.

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Snowplow Cutting Edges Polyurethane Versus Rubber

Finding that perfect combination of truck and blade wasn’t easy, but you managed. Now, you’ve got to put some teeth on that plow. Since you’ll be doing a lot of work in residential areas, steel and carbide edges are out of the question. They’re rough on roads and too loud for regular use. So, you’re down to two options: rubber and polyurethane.

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Polyurethane Gaskets

Polyurethane gaskets provide exceptional bonding capabilities, strong weather resistance, and extremely slow degradation. These gaskets will be resistant to moderate chemicals, oils, hydrocarbons, greases, fats, and ozone.

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Poly-Tek is IATF 16949 Polyurethane Company

Here at Poly-Tek, we proudly adhere to the IATF-16949 quality standard in all facets of our molding and manufacturing processes.

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Polyurethane Slurry Pump Impellers

The impeller is arguably the essential part of your centrifugal pump, and slurry applications can be particularly hard on it. Because of the abrasive nature of the slurry, it’s critical that you choose the right impeller so you can operate effectively without constant breakdowns.

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Polyurethane Rollers

Because of its numerous advantages, polyurethane has become the go-to material for production line rollers. In today’s piece, we’ll explore why that is and learn a bit more about how rollers help the world go round.

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Polyurethane Pipeline Pigs

It’s an item that isn’t well known outside of the industries that use pipelines to move their products, but within them, polyurethane pipeline pigs—or “Poly Pigs” as they are often called—are an essential part of their operations. With slightly oversized diameters, the pigs can remove all sorts of debris, such as loose sediment, product buildup, and foreign matter, to help increase a pipeline’s carrying capacity and improve product quality.

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Suspension Bushings: Polyurethane vs. Rubber

New cars seem to float on the road, making every bump and pothole feel like an afterthought. Wanting to keep that magic carpet feel, you get your car serviced at every opportunity. But, even with that new car air freshener and routine maintenance, it soon loses its smooth gait. Before long, you can feel every divot in the road. In most cases, a worn-out bushing is to blame. If it’s time for new bushings, you need to ask yourself one thing:  rubber or urethane?

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Rubber Spider Couplings

A spider coupling is a power transmission coupling that can also be used in motion control applications, for example, a motor. It connects two shafts while minimizing vibrations and compensating for any parallel, angular, and axial misalignment.

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Deblinding Balls

It’s one of the primary causes of downtime and lost production in the screening process. It’s officially called “blinding” in the mining and aggregate industries, and it happens whenever the screen mesh openings are blocked by the material that is being screened.

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Polyurethane Impact Bars

Poly-Tek manufactures impact bars designed to prevent belt damage and offer much-needed impact and wear resistance. Without the help of these bars, maintenance expenses for both the bed and the belt would be substantially higher.

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Rubber Milking Liners

You can’t minimize the importance of the milking liner. After all, it’s the only part of the milking machine that comes into direct contact with the cow’s teats. That alone is enough to make it a vital component in the process of milking cows swiftly, gently and thoroughly.

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Which is Better for Mining Screening Media – Rubber or Polyurethane?

Mining operations have been using woven wire cloth screening products for many years with satisfactory results. Certain operations that experience unusually high wear and require frequent screen replacements, however, should likely be considering engineered screen media. Rubber and polyurethane panels are two materials that have been shown to handle abrasive or heavy materials more effectively than woven wire.

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Polyurethane No Crush Rollers

The answer with several different names—zero crush rollers, spacer wheels, hold-down wheels, soft touch wheels, just to name a few—but no matter which term you choose.

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Rubber Seals for Grinding Mill Liner Bolts

There are different types of seals used in a mill liner fastening system. For enlarged or elongated bolt holes, there are cone repair seals in diameters of 1″ through to 2″.  A repair seal includes a cone that extends through the grinding mill shell, whereas a regular seal does not have a cone. 

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Tree Shaker Pads

Poly-Tek manufactures and sells a variety of rubber parts for nut industry. One of those parts is the shaker pad. Rubber tree shaker pads are used to shake the trunk of different types of trees including almond trees, pecan trees, walnut trees, pistachio trees, olive trees, cherry trees, etc.

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Rubber Engine Mounts vs Polyurethane Engine Mounts

Poly-Tek has been manufacturing the best rubber and polyurethane engine mounts for over 60 years. Rubber and polyurethane are used in many automotive applications because of their excellent reversible elastic deformation properties and excellent damping and energy absorption characteristics. There are advantages and disadvantages between the two types of mounts, which we will discuss below.

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