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Company Spotlight: Craftech

Craftech Industries Inc.

www.craftechind.com

Manufacturing high performance plastic fasteners and components for over 40 years.

Craftech Industries has been a manufacturer specializing in plastic components for roughly 40 years. Located in the Hudson, New York, it originally machined screws, spacers, and other simple parts

out of such now commoditized plastics as Nylon, Delrin, and Phenolic. Today, Craftech machines and molds hundreds of plastic materials and is an ISO 9001-2008 company who is also enrolled with ITAR. Craftech molds, machines and distributes every conceivable variety and shape of plastic, and serves an ever-growing list of customers that includes Fortune 500 and small companies alike. Semiconductor, photovoltaic, medical, aerospace, wastewater, chemical and telecommunications are a small sampling of industries served within it’s highly diversified customer base.
Although Craftech’s major thrust is in producing plastic components and parts of all types, Craftech also produces its own tooling so customers whose assemblies include some metal parts can often be accommodated. Whereas parts were once made on old-fashioned cam-activated machinery, today parts of any complexity, or requiring a high level of quality control are made on modern CNC machines. Craftech can also provide design and engineering assistance when requested and has developed the knowledge of how best to machine various plastics over its long history.

As far as parts designated for high moisture or underwater use are concerned, the anticorrosive qualities of some plastics have been well documented, making plastics, along with stainless steels, major components of such items as ROVs and other submersibles. Plastics and foams are obviously also used for more prosaic items such as floats, docks, fasteners and a vast host of other items such as propellers and shaft bearings. Since some of the same plastics that are water-resistant also have very low coefficients of friction, this last application is these days becoming more common. Of course, where plastics once had rather anemic tensile strength and Young’s modulus, today some reinforced, injection-molded thermoplastics top out at a yield strength, for example, of over 50,000 psi. Some pultruded reinforced plastics can be double to triple that number. By way of comparison, the yield strength of 50,000 psi is higher than that of 304 stainless, the difference being that after a metal surpasses its linear stress-strain curve, it can exhibit a rather extensive elastic zone prior to break.

It must be noted that most reinforced plastics exhibit a linear stress-strain curve that results in their abrupt break. In other words, the addition of fibers of any kind to either thermoplastics, thermosets, and pultruded thermosets, increases a plastic’s strength, but decreases it’s elasticity. In general, the addition of fibers also lowers a plastic’s IZOD notched number, although some reinforced plastics, such as the reinforced TPU’s (thermoplastic polyurethanes) can still possess surprisingly high IZOD numbers, even when compared to such known high-impact plastics as polycarbonate. This kind of material also possesses low water absorption and good salt water survivability, and this is one of the many reasons that Craftech recommends and molds a good amount of these materials. Whereas nylon 6 and nylon 6/6, although surprisingly still used underwater, absorb so much water that over time they tend to break down, particularly in salt water. All of the above-mentioned types of plastics also have different directionally sensitive properties. Some plastics may exhibit weak knit lines when molded, while others may exhibit very different shrinkage properties parallel and transverse to material flow into mold cavities.

Craftech has been molding thermoplastics for over 27 years and has been making its own tooling with modern CNC equipment for over 16 years. Today, tooling can often be produced for relatively simple parts in as little as one to three weeks. In addition to the outright engineering done by the company, its staff has developed that ‘feel’ for when an application is a good candidate for the use of engineering plastics as well as for what type of plastic might best serve. Its sales people and engineers stand ready to apply this experience when requested, as opposed to solely offering a cheap price. Craftech’s management is making every effort to position itself to be able to provide excellent service for well into the 21st century. They hope to be able to provide a competent and a pleasant and productive experience for all of its present and future customers.