Hydrographics, also known as immersion printing or water transfer imaging, is a unique process of applying a printed designs to a three-dimensional surfaces making it ideal for customization with endless design options. The Hydropgraphic immersion printing process can be done on a variety of materials including plastic parts.

How does 3-D printing technology affect an 80 year old plastic knob and custom plastic parts manufacturer?  That was one of the questions that was asked to Derran Smith, President of Davies Molding, in a recent interview on CEO Intronet.

Shifter knobs can be found in vehicles, cranes, tractors, and other types of machinery where manipulating gears are required. Davies’ shifter knobs can be customized to meet specific requirements such as operating instructions or customer logos. Secondary operations include laser engraving, pad printing, or hot stamping, applying inlays or mylars, color matching, drilling, machining, and a new finishing trend- hydrographic printing.

Hydrographic printing is a popular trend for adding customizable designs, colors, and textures to shift knobs.  As you might have guessed, it's a water-based printing process and a  high gloss polyurethane hydrographics clearcoat makes the printing durable and long-lasting.

It was an extra-special celebration at our holiday luncheon this year.  The food was pretty good,  the speeches were encouraging, but the annual employee anniversary awards were downright awe-inspiring.   15 and even 20 years of service seems relatively common in the manufacturing world, but 30 and 45? That is true dedication. Davies Molding has been molding custom plastic parts for over 80 years, and we attribute a large part of our success to the dedication of employees like Barb Hanson, who celebrated her 45 year anniversary, and Carol Cimino, who celebrated her 30 year anniversary.   Here is a list of all of the employees that celebrated their anniversaries - Congratulations!

We recently received an email from a history buff inquiring about the brand name Daka-ware and how it's related to Bake-lite, another name brand in the plastic molding industry.  In his email, the history buff explained that "Daka-ware is a common search on search engines but there's no real official answer". So we created this blog post to help fill in some of the gaps of this topic and provide a (hopefully) helpful "official" answer.  

Nothing is more important than choosing the right material for your plastic knob or handle.  Careful consideration of the end user and application can save time and money in the long-run.  Don’t know where to start?  Here is list of materials for both thermoset plus thermoplastic and their applications to get you started.  Talk to our highly trained technical sales and engineering staff if you have questions.  We work with hundreds of various materials and constantly reviewing new materials as they come on the market. 

What materials are available for plastic knobs and which is right for my application?

Our 4570 Soft Touch Handle is showing up more in more in new industrial applications.  Here are the top 3 trends in industrial pull handles that's driving the success:

Luckily Davies Molding is close to Chicago, so I get to take a few hours out of my work day to go down to manufacturing shows at McCormick Place and check out some cool new stuff in manufacturing.  On Thursday I visited FABTECH to see what's new in the welding and fabrication world.  Here are my 3 takeaways from the event:

Having the right color part is very important for many applications that require knobs, either because it is functional, industry or product specific, or for appearance. The standard color for phenolic material is black. Other colors are available, but usually cost more. Red is the second most popular phenolic knob color, typically used for ball or lever knobs.  

There are a variety of plastic knobs that are particularly suited for manual valve controls.  “T” or Bar knobs are the most popular plastic knobs used for manual valve control applications. Here are examples of different shapes of bar knobs available.