It’s a big challenge to achieve color consistency for large production runs of plastic injection molded parts. To ensure consistency when molding colors, it’s essential that you have careful process control at every step.

It’s important to note that plastic color is highly subjective – subjective in how you see and interpret plastic color. It depends on viewing conditions, visual acuity, the light source, and many other variables.

Color Consistency Challenges During Injection Molding Process

The volume of parts is the most important factor affecting the consistency of molding colors.

Why is this important? It’s important because plastic resin suppliers typically have minimum order quantities that apply to pre-compounded resins. These MOQ restrictions can affect a product developer’s decision about the smartest way to prepare colors for plastics.

Some coloring processes that are fine for small batch orders wouldn’t work for large-scale production.

The Importance Of Pantone

Pantone plastic color charts and plastic color chips are important tools used to measure and prepare molding colors. Pantone is the industry leader in making plastic color chips to help design professionals mix, match, and measure liquid colors for plastics.

The great value of Pantone color chip samples is the standard reference numbers that take all the guesswork out of the process. Although they have thousands of standard reference colors, be aware there are millions of colors out there.

That’s why other systems and color reference charts are also used.

What Is Masterbatch And Its Importance

‘Masterbatch’ refers to a highly concentrated pigment that’s used to make large volumes of colored plastic injection molding resin.

Plastic masterbatch pigment is mixed at a ratio of one part of color masterbatch to 24 parts of the base material. This means that a little masterbatch goes a long way.

And, since it’s sold in minimum order quantities of two metric tons, this represents a very large number of finished parts.

What Is Masterbatch And Its Importance

‘Masterbatch’ refers to a highly concentrated pigment that’s used to make large volumes of colored plastic injection molding resin.

Plastic masterbatch pigment is mixed at a ratio of one part of color masterbatch to 24 parts of the base material. This means that a little masterbatch goes a long way.

And, since it’s sold in minimum order quantities of two metric tons, this represents a very large number of finished parts.

Our next blog will tell you how to achieve consistent colors, see you soon