Author Topic: Dongle/pendrive plastic cover - low pressure molding?  (Read 1593 times)

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Offline up8051Topic starter

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Dongle/pendrive plastic cover - low pressure molding?
« on: March 21, 2017, 02:50:39 pm »
I'm looking for information about technology of making such enclosures/cases (for example Yubico Key)
Is is low pressure molding?
I have one on the desk and  the material is rather hard plastic not like material on cable plugs.

Regards,
up8051



« Last Edit: March 21, 2017, 02:57:12 pm by up8051 »
 

Offline kosine

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Re: Dongle/pendrive plastic cover - low pressure molding?
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2017, 02:11:30 pm »
Probably injection moulded in two-parts and clipped or ultrasonically welded together. If it's a hard plastic it's likely to be a styrene of some sort, ABS perhaps.

If you have access to an injection moulding machine (which are not all that expensive secondhand), then it's possible to make an aluminium mould in a small workshop with a hobby CNC milling machine. You could produce about 50 two-part cases in an hour on a cheap mould, though you'd probably glue the halves together to keep it simple.

Yesterday afternoon I helped a local student make some ABS keyring spanners. A hollow flash-drive case wouldn't be much more difficult. It's a weekend project once you know how to do it, and you can easily play around with different materials and colours etc.

(There's a bit of sinking on the spanner surface - you'd normally add a blowing agent to the plastic granules to fix it, but this was a quick demo run, so I didn't bother.)

 


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