Custom Plastic Extrusion Process Using a Play-Doh Plunger

When people ask me to describe the extrusion process for them, I say, hey, you remember the Play-Doh plunger when you were a kid? I certainly do. I had Play-Doh and played with it all the time. So, let’s take a look at the Play-Doh plunger and how this looks like the extrusion process. We’re going to start out with the plunger. This represents the extruder. Now, in the extrusion process, you have dies. Well, with the Play-Doh plunger, these strips here, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later, represent the dies or the tooling that we talk about, in the extrusion process. And of course, in the plastic extrusion process, we have plastic, right? That’s the raw material. And the doh, the Play-Doh, represents the material. And of course, the plastics, just like Play-Doh comes in a multitude of colors. So let’s take a look at how this works. We’re going to take some material, plastic, or Play-Doh. I’m going to put it in the plunger. Or, in this case, the extruder. Then I am going to put on the die. So, we’re going to put the die on the Play-Doh plunger. And there’s the die. Then, I’m going to push the Play-Doh through the die. And of course, we can cut that profile or star at whatever length we want, depending on how long you’d want it. And, obviously, we can change up the die. So if you don’t want Stars, let’s say we want some squares. So we are going to put the die onto the extruder. And we’re going to force the material through the die. And there we have it, now, we’ve got squares coming out. And again, we can cut this to any length that you’d like. So, Play-Doh plunger, extrusion process, they look pretty much the same. Hey, visit our website where you can get an Instant Quote on over 250 of our stock tools.