Thin Foil for Stunning Injection-Molded Parts

January 2011Benecke-Kaliko’s new DecoJect™ thin foil offers a cost-effective alternative to varnishing injected-molded vehicle interior surfaces. Applicable for back injection molding, the decorative foil noticeably upgrades unvarnished injected molded parts.

Carmakers rely heavily on injection molded surfaces, especially for compacts and affordable high-volume vehicles. It is an economical solution, but one that also suffers from a number of drawbacks. The most obvious of these is the rather basic look it gives parts. Subsequent varnishing is then an extra, costly process. To top it all off, it may not even yield optimum results in all cases.

With the new TPO-based 0.2-to-0.5-mm-thin DecoJect™ foil, Benecke-Kaliko has opted for a completely new tack that considerably ups scratch resistance while at the same time adding a marked look of elegance to the components. The resulting foil is ideal for parts subject to lots of wear and tear, like seat shells, doors, center consoles, map cases, pillar bottom sides, headrest backs, rear window shelves and the underside of the instrument panel. What is more, DecoJect™ lends itself well to injection molded parts commonly found to date even in top-shelf vehicles – on everything from the running-board embellisher to the trunk loading sill.

A backing tool is used to impart grain structure to the decorative surface. Virtually everything is possible here, from a genuine leather look-alike to technical grains. As the grain pattern is prone to extremely minimal stretching, it holds up satisfactorily even on parts with tight radii. DecoJect™ is, moreover, highly versatile in terms of color and degree of gloss, allowing it to easily match up with other components. As a matter of fact, the wide range of colors, decorative patterns and effect varnishes opens the door to completely new directions in design.

The recyclable interior foils contain neither halogens nor plasticizers. And with DecoJect™, the matter of changing colors is nowhere near the cumbersome process it is with an injection molded surface, where, for every switch, the molding line first has to be completely emptied of material in the one color and then run in with material in the new color. With Benecke-Kaliko’s new thin foil, the component can be produced the whole time with the one back injection material, even when the surface design is switched. This saves time and makes for less scrap. The foil can also be used to disguise typical injection molding flaws such as seams and color and gloss deviations in substrate components, thereby helping to achieve uniform surface quality.

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