Barkston Offers Free Advice on How to Make Better Products with Plastic

Specialist plastics engineer Barkston offers a complimentary consultation service to help potential customers develop and optimise their products using plastics.

As marketing manager Joanne Dell explains. “We offer free advice to companies right from the initial product design and development phase – guiding people in the best way to manufacture their products and overcome problems before they get to production. We offer this free review service to customers to say ‘What can we do to make your business more profitable? Let’s see how we can help you, how we can reduce your costs and make your product more quickly.’ This includes advising them on replacing the materials they currently use, such as metals, that might be heavier, more expensive, less flexible than plastics.”

New celebrating its 403rd year in business, Barkston offers a high level plastic fabrication and machining service covering products ranging from complete process lines to small machined components in all types of plastic materials.

As well as high technology processes such as robot laser welding and CNC routing the company also uses skilled hands-on methods to provide the highest levels of finish and quality in components such as clear acrylic isolation chambers for medical applications.

Orders tend to be for one offs or small batches for customers in industries that include, process engineering, medical equipment, printing, architecture, retail and general engineering.

Barkston recently celebrated its 40th anniversary and as operations director Mark Carter explains: “We don’t just do straightforward fabrications, we are a very high technology plastics company.”

The company invested in its robot welding process in order to be more competitive and open up new markets. Using a process developed in conjunction with TWI and fine tuned over the past two years, Barkston can produce welds in materials such as polypropylene, clear acrylics and even thermoset materials. The 6-axis robot laser can make multiple joints and weld multiple layers in a single pass and three dimensional joint forms with a high degree of control.

The high weld speeds make it a very competitive process compared to hand fabrication and bond strengths are superior to other joining methods.

The laser has already allowed Barkston to see off foreign competitions and supply a complete process line to China, and is also used for high integrity components for a vacuum pump manufacturer and is being used in the development of high energy density fuel cells.

Managing director Tim Kiernan says: “We believe this is the only process of its kind available in Europe – and possibly the world. Whereas in the past laser welding has only really been applied to thin gauge plastics, this is an industrial process that can be readily used on thicker materials.”