Case Study – Use of MAGNAVIS® 8A Red for casting plastic numbers

May 2016

Customer

Our customer specialises in castings. For a specific application, they wanted to create red numbers for the purpose of identifying casting moulds, using a red pigmented product combined with a resin.

Challenge

The customer was aware of MAGNAVIS® 8A Red but wasn’t sure if this material would be suitable for this application. In addition to its functional performance as a pigment, they wanted to be sure that there were no health and safety concerns with using larger scale quantities of 8A Red.

Solution

MAGNAVIS® 8A Red is a dark red-coloured iron powder which is normally used for dry magnetic powder inspection, where it provides a strong contrast on most surfaces and coloured backgrounds. It is very stable up to temperatures around 300°C.

From a chemical safety point of view, 8A Red is not classified as dangerous according to Regulation (EC) Number 1272/2008 (CLP).  The only precaution was that associated with handling a dust.

Results

Our customer carried out tests using 8A Red which proved to be highly successful. They have now produced more than 1,000 numbers for a minimal outlay. If they had gone down the route of purchasing these externally, this cost would have been 50 times greater.

The photograph above shows how our client developed the process for making the numbers. The ‘4’ represents the first prototype; with the ‘9’ they had improved the shape, and with the ‘01’, process improvements had enabled them to eliminate surface imperfections.