If you’re promising your customers the best in door and window design, chances are you’re also promising them a unique product of the highest quality. Extruded seals give your doors and windows extra compression, proper adhesion and physical stability. But to get the most out of them, customize your extruded seals to your specific product design.
Extruded seals are surprisingly versatile. Based on your application, customization gives you the opportunity to increase your extruded seal’s long-term performance, improve compression set resistance, bolster stability, minimize friction, and reduce loss of functional height.
If you’re looking for a made-to-order extruded seal that is specifically designed for your product, this article covers a few features you can mix and match to make your seals work for you.
Customizable Extrusion Features
Consider these features and pick the combination that best suits your specific goals to make-your-own extruded seals.
1.) Choose Your Material
It may seem obvious that material is at the very core of an effective extruded seal design. To select the proper material for your custom seal, you’ll need to consider the seal’s closure force requirements, environment, and attachment requirements.
Based on your application’s needs, you have the power to choose the best material for your product. You can decide if the material needs to be flexible or rigid, rubber or foam, thermoplastic or polyolefin.
2. Choose Your Shape and Profile
Another feature you can customize for your extruded seal is your seal’s shape and profile.
Here, consider the seal’s application first. Does it need to allow for sliding or compression forces? Does it need to protect from air and water or does it just need to provide excellent stability?
You can decide between a number of different shapes and profiles including T-Slot, Kerf mounted profiles, leaf, and multi-hollow bulb seals. You can even design a custom profile to create the best possible solution for your unique product.
3. Choose Your Color
An increasingly important feature to consider when creating your custom extruded seal is its color. Consumers are becoming more and more interested in the aesthetics of their windows and doors, sometimes even down to the color match of the seals.
When you create your extruded seals, ensure that you have options for color that reflect your common production needs. Ultrafab offers excellent color consistency with five standard colors–black, white, tan, brown, and gray–and custom colors are available.
4. Consider Co-extrusion
Co-extrusion combines multiple materials on the same piece to meet multiple application needs with one component. Co-extrusion is achieved by pushing different materials through the same die, giving you the best mechanical properties from each material.
If your application calls for the properties of multiple materials, consider using co-extrusion to further customize your seal.
And More…
You can further adjust extruded seals to better suit your needs by determining the exact length and width of the seal, even down to the width of the seal backing. You can also decide if you want a finish like Ultrafab’s UltraGlide seal formulation.
Feeling Overwhelmed with Options?
Ultrafab can help. We have years of engineering expertise and handle custom extruded seal orders every day.
We can help you determine what options will work best for you for everything from material to profile to size, and we can even help you find ways to get the best custom seal for your budget. We do it all in-house so that our partners can be confident that they will get their quality, custom products as efficiently as possible.