Carville offer CNC plastic machining services and specialise in the heat treatment and precision machining of acrylic and other engineering grade plastics. Acrylic material is also referred to as Perspex, Plexiglas or Polycast.
The Carville manufacturing business was founded in 1928 and Carville started to produce both machined and fabricated acrylic parts and assemblies in the 1930's. Carville's earlier manufacturing services were focused on the automotive and aerospace industries.
Carville are a UK based manufacturing company and have over 80 years experience in the precision machining of acrylic and other plastics. Carville produce all of our machined plastic parts at our manufacturing facility in Dorking, Surrey.
Carville's business focus is to provide our customers with a high level of service and to produce custom plastic parts that will perform well in the end applications. These services can include project management, product development, prototyping and full production volume manufacturing.
Carville have been offering contract manufacturing services for over 80 years and we supply to customers throughout Europe, Asia and the USA. Carville operate scheduled delivery agreements with a number of our larger customers. These schedule agreements allow Carville to produce plastic parts and plastic components in advance and to ship these to our end customer's production facilities from our finished stock.
Carville are a business to business service provider. The philosophy at Carville is to produce precision machined plastic parts and plastic components that are correct to the customer's specifications, are delivered on time and are competitively priced.
Heat Treatment of Plastics
The most cost effective way to produce materials such as Acrylic or PEEK is to use either a casting or extrusion process. Although cost effective, cast acrylic or extruded PEEK materials can be highly stressed and have a surface skin which can pull and distort components during and after the manufacturing processes.
To ensure stable dimensions and a long life for precision machined component parts, it is essential that materials are correctly heat treated to remove internal stress. Carville will not manufacture plastic component parts without fully heat treating the base material at the pre-production stage.
On plastic materials such as acrylic (PMMA), the initial heat treatment, or normalization processes, can result in material shrinkage of between 2% and 4%.
All plastic materials used by Carville are normalised using controlled heat treatment processes before any machining operations take place.
During the production process, all components are stage annealed to remove any stresses that may have been induced due to the machining operations.
Subject to the component size and the volume of material removed, the heat treatment processes may be performed several times during manufacturing operations. These heat treatment processes can add 3 to 5 days to the manufacturing process.
Learn more about plastic bonding or CNC milling