Rolls of masking tape Masking aims to protect areas of a part against surface treatment. Generally, masking is a long and tedious operation that requires handling and lots of adhesive.
Adhesive tape is the most commonly used masking tool in industry, yet it’s far from being the most practical and suitable option.
Indeed, tape requires manual application and is not reusable. However, no alternative seems to present itself, so how can we replace it?
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What is Masking?
What is Masking? If you’ve arrived on this page, you probably know what masking is, but let’s review it anyway to clearly visualize the objectives.
When you need to treat a part (painting, sandblasting, chemical treatment, etc.), it’s very common to need to protect one or more areas from the treatment. This operation allows you to treat only the intended areas.
The easiest way to implement this partial protection of a part is to use an adhesive that is applied to the surfaces to be protected.
The adhesive has the advantage of sticking to the surface. This is partly why (along with its price) it is widely used. It is sufficiently reliable and practical to accomplish what’s asked of it.
Why Replace Masking Tape?
But if masking tape meets our needs, why would we want to replace it?
Indeed, tape meets the needs, it protects the areas to be spared (not always perfectly, but we’ll come back to that later).
This is why most companies worldwide use adhesives for protection against surface treatments.
However, masking adhesive has many drawbacks, and many of its users are looking for alternatives.
Among the biggest problems are:
- Handling: The tape must be placed by hand, piece by piece. It’s a repetitive process that is expensive in terms of labor and very time-consuming.
- Single use: Once the part is treated, the masking must be removed. It cannot be reused from one part to another; you always have to start from scratch.
- Price: Although tape itself isn’t very expensive, the two reasons mentioned above make it a very costly masking technique.
- Efficiency: It’s obvious that placing tape masking isn’t very precise, and it’s not uncommon for the tape to not work as expected and damage the part.
As you can understand, these problems are very damaging for the company, especially if you damage parts during the process.
All these reasons are why companies are increasingly looking for alternatives to adhesives that are less expensive and easier to implement.
The Plastiform Solution
Faced with this problem encountered by many of our partners, we decided to put Plastiform products to the test for masking applications.
Unlike adhesives, Plastiforms can be molded to the shape of the part. This is particularly interesting for creating custom molds that can accommodate multiple parts.
Thus, you multiply your productivity, as you perform a single handling operation for multiple parts.
This operation sometimes takes longer than applying tape to the surface of the part, but since the molds are reusable, you’ll save a lot of handling time in the long run!
And this isn’t the only advantage of Plastiforms for part protection.
Most surface treatments don’t damage the Plastiform mold, making it a formidable reusable protection tool.
To summarize, Plastiform brings you major advantages:
- The mold is reusable multiple times and protects several parts simultaneously,
- Its resolution is close to a micron, and the product adheres to the surface (like a suction cup). This ensures the mold’s effectiveness in its protection mission.
- It can be flexible to easily extract parts, even complex ones.
The molds made with Plastiform products are thus excellent tools for replacing adhesives and address many of their shortcomings, especially since, with micron resolution, they are more effective than simple tapes.
Adhesive Substitution with Plastiform
Plastiform is a viable alternative to masking tapes, sure, but how do you implement it?
Well, it’s quite simple in concept – you need to set up a mold or spot protections on your part(s).
Different Types of Molds
Plastiform allows you to implement different types of protection molds. Each mold is suitable for specific applications, and it’s important to determine which is the right solution for your needs.
That being said, some molds are much more commonly used than others.
It’s not uncommon to encounter similar applications, and this is the case for many companies that share the same masking challenges.
Here are some examples of commonly used molds. They cover more than 90% of the part masking issues we encounter:
This mold is a Plastiform block that can accommodate a large number of small parts.
The idea with this mold is to treat surfaces by embedding the rest of the part in the mold.
This mold is much more technical!
It is generally used for very complex parts where you want to protect only one section.
It comes in two parts; to secure it, you need to close it around the part and fix it in place.
This isn’t a mold, but rather plugs / spot protections.
These protections are implemented on a case-by-case basis and aren’t always reusable, but they have the advantage of being more practical to apply than tape and, most importantly, much more precise.
Setting Up a Protection Mold
Creating the mold is the most complicated step because it requires setup.
But what are a few minutes of ingenuity compared to hours of intensive taping?
We won’t address spot protections here since they can be applied like taking a classic Plastiform impression.
Let’s distinguish between two scenarios: The multi-part protection mold and the complex shape protection mold
In the first case, it’s generally quite simple to create the mold. It can be done in 3 steps:
- First step. Find the suitable product. Generally, you’ll choose F30 XL if you need flexibility, or F50 XL and F70 XL if you need a bit more rigidity.
- Second step. Find a container of the desired mold size. Then, fill it with 2 to 5 cm of product and let it harden for 35 minutes.
- Final step. Position the parts on the Plastiform surface. Leave only the surface to be treated facing upward and pour more product until covering all areas to be protected.
That’s it!
All you have to do is let the product polymerize quietly for at least 35 minutes, and you’ll have your mold. With this, you can easily extract the treated parts and replace them with the next ones.
Let’s move on to the second case, which is more complex to set up.
These molds are very situational and encompass the part over a specific area to be protected.
Their setup therefore requires forming a two-part mold with an area on each side (of each mold part) where you’ll clamp them against the piece.
To create this type of mold, you have two options:
- The first is to not make the mold yourself and contact one of our experts to handle it.
- The second is to create a mold as indicated for the previous mold, making sure to split it in two.
If you choose the second option, the most complex step is planning the clamping mechanism in the mold. Be sure to study your mold well before attempting to create it.
Conclusion
Here you are at the end of a wild adventure in search of an alternative solution to traditional masking techniques.
As we’ve seen, tape-based masking has numerous flaws: It’s expensive, time-consuming, imprecise, and requires a lot of handling.
Conversely, custom molds can prove very effective in ensuring protection missions against surface treatments.
Questions about how it works? Leave us a message!
