Our First Giveaway: The Materials Handbook

The Materials Handbook by George S. Brady, Henry H. Clauser and John A Vacarri has been a trusted resource for over 50 years. We have used it since our days at Small Parts Inc., and even offered it for sale in our catalog. It is a great resource for anyone working with plastics and/or metals and need or want to know what the various properties are and why it should be used or not used in various applications. It is an expensive book and you can find it on Amazon.com for about $75. We are giving one away for free through a drawing on our facebook page. All you have to do is visit our facebook page and "like" the post about this giveaway that was posted on 12/3/2013 to be entered into the drawing.

We are trying to get more people involved in our facebook page. We would like it to be a place where we can share product and application information and for customers to come and get ideas or practical information about the products they use. We are coupling this with our new youtube videos. These videos are instructional videos about our products or product reviews. We believe that, over time, the combination of our website, youtube and social media sites such as facebook and google plus we can be a useful resource to the research and development community as well as a valuable supplier.

Check out our home page and see what we are doing. Component Supply Company

Cutting Hypodermic Tubing

Here is a video we uploaded recently about hypodermic tube cutting.

Non-Coring Deflective Needles

Non-coring needles are specially configured needles designed with a deflected point. The distal end of the hypodermic needle tube is positioned in such a way that it eliminates the potential to "core" a membrane as it passes through it.  This results in prolonging the life of the septum and eliminating the potential for the tube to become occluded during the insertion process.  A non-coring deflective needle may have a slight offset at the end of the needle, with the grind of the needle parallel with the needle shaft.   Or may have a very marginal offset with the needle opening almost tangential to the shaft.  The latter configuration is referred to as a "Huber" bevel.  Non-coring needles may be ground to a sharp point, or may be almost blunt or soft, depending on their application.  Length can vary from 3/4" to 6", but we have seen applications where custom needles as long as 8" have been requested. 

Hypodermic Tubing Bending

Let’s face it, bending a thin little hollow tube that’s smaller than a 1/16” diameter takes virtually no effort at all.   The rub comes when you still want to be able to pass a gas or a liquid through that tube after it is bent.   As I am sure you have figured out by now, particularly if you’ve ever tried it, the essential problem in bending hypodermic tubing, and other full hard-thin walled tubing, is how to create the bend without collapsing the walls of the tube in the process.  How successful you are at mitigating this problem is directly related to how well you deal with these three questions.  How big?  How steep?   How long?  So before you design your next project with some little small innocuous bent hypodermic tubing incorporated into it be sure to consider these three very inter -related issues.  

How big (or small) is the OD and ID of the tube I need to bend?  Generally speaking, the larger the diameter, the easier the tube is to bend.  However, the thinner the wall, the more likely the tube wall is to collapse while being bent.

How steep of a angle do I need to bend?  Obviously the greater the angle of bend, the more difficulty you will have in maintaining the wall integrity.  We recently did a job for a customer who needed a 135° bend (in essence a V shape.)  In this job the issue was not how to maintain the tubes ID, but how much could we minimize and control the collapse of the tube walls during the bending process.

How long can the radius be?  The compression / tension forces on the tube walls are exponentially reduced as the radius increases.  So your success rate will significantly increase as the radius increases. 

Here is an example of the inter-relationship of all of this.  Even though stainless steel hypodermic tubing is a full hard tube, when you get down into the very small ODs like 0.013”- .032” the tubing does not have enough tensile strength to remain at the radius they are formed  (they spring back). So you wind up having to bend them at a much smaller radius than your finished radius, thereby compounding your problems.

 

 

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Cutting PTFE Tubing

We have always cut PTFE tubing or sleeves for various medical or electronics applications. This is one of the more difficult tasks depending on the specifications. This tubing naturally has a "coiled" memory to it because it was spooled after the extruding process. So holding straight cut ends, particularly on longer length parts has some real challenges. Another challenge is the maintaining the I.D. and O.D. integrity. This tubing is thin wall and can easily collapse. Not quite as bad as polyimide tubing, but it is prone to collapse and kink. Tooling is critical and we have hours and hours in developing the best tools to cut this material so that the finished parts fall within the specifications of our customers.

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Hello to the world with an updated website

One of the mistakes we made when we owned Small Parts was that, in one hand, we really separated the side of our business that supplied quality component from the side that cut, bent, beveled and performed other various secondary operations, and on the other hand we did not. Our custom cutting and manufacturing division was separate in terms that we had a dedicated staff of machinists and technicians working with our customers to modify the tubing, wire and materials we supply. At the same time we did not separate it from the standpoint of marketing and discovery. The capabilities and operations were briefly talked about in our catalog and mentioned on our website, but not much was dedicated to it, though we produced thousands of parts every year.

This time we are dong a better job. We have established Tubeandwirecutting.com to communicate our capabilities while not interfering, or being confused with the distribution site, componentsupplycompany.com. Our intent with this site is show not only our capabilities for the operations that can be performed on the products we supply, but also to shoe people in general what can be done with the many components we supply. We have always believed that great things can happen the bright, creative people are exposed to quality materials and components. Our hope is that this will be a tool for those people.
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