BP Rapid provides an integrated parts finishing service to meet your device requirements. With our experienced in-house skills and advanced facilities, we do our best to ensure the surface finishes of color, texture, and gloss to meet your expectations.

What Post Finishing we have For Your Prototype Parts?

BP Rapid in-house prototype process is capable of providing the best post finishing, including regular machine finish, sanding smooth, sand blasting, high polishing, color painting, and artwork printing. We also offer other finishing for metals including laser etching(laser engraving), anodizing, powder coating, baking paint, metal plating, vacuum metalizing, medical chromium plating, chemical film (chem film), passivation, heat treatment, etc.

General Post Processing

1. Regular Machined Finish

Machined parts will have tooling marks that follow the path of the cutting tool. The machined finish is a smooth surface created by a machine without handing work, it only needs a little handwork to remove the bur and sharp edges, then the part could be finished and delivered quickly soon after off the machine.

The standard machined surface roughness is Ra 3.2-1.6 μm;

The smooth machined surface roughness is Ra 1.6-0.8 μm;

The super-finished surface roughness is Ra 0.8-0.2 μm.

The finishing will increase the cost of producing a part due to extra machining steps and tighter quality controls.

2. Sanding and Polishing

BP can do smooth sanding by sanding paper to remove the machining marks, burrs, and machine lines that left by milling tools and printing process, as well as the adhesive marks on the surface of the parts when fix on the CNC platform. The sanding process will improve the part flatness and smooth feeling, and to create a better uniform appearance of the parts. 

High polishing is a process that normally applies on the surface that require a mirror finish on most of the plastic, metal parts, clear acrylic and polycarbonate parts; after that the parts will be in a high glossy cosmetic look and perfect smooth assembly effect. Mainly parts are on clear automotive headlamps, reflectors, shafts, gearings, bearings and so on.

Sanded to #600 grit sandpaper surface finish is Ra 0.8 μm;

Sanded to #1000 grit sandpaper surface finish is Ra 0.4 μm;

Mirror polished and clear polished surface finish is Ra 0.1-0.05 μm.

3. Sand Blasting

Bead blasting adds a uniform sand matte surface finish on a machined part, removing the marks by tool and sandpaper. It is the operation of forcibly propelling a stream of abrasive material against a surface under high pressure to smooth a rough surface, or to remove surface contaminants. Glass beads come in different sizes from #80 to #220.

4. Painting 

Paint Colors:

We uses Pantone Matching System and RAL Classic System to match custom colors or paint samples. We can also do two-color or multi-color painting to obtain a more complicated appearance looks like 2K molding.

Paint Finishes:

The paint that we are using is the noble PPG automotive paint which is stable and good quality. We can supply different paint finishes in matte, semi-gloss, glossy finish, or satin finish. We can also simulate a specific Mold-Tech texture, SPI or VDI texture, and soft touch to achieve a rubber feeling which is similar to the texture or over-molding of injection molding parts.

Finishing for Metal Products

Anodizing

Anodizing helps to resist corrosion, increase surface hardness, improve resistance to wear. This process serves both functional and cosmetic purposes. There are two main types of anodizing which is standard type II anodized and type III hard anodized, 

Type II anodizing is mainly used to produce parts with a uniform, aesthetically pleasing surface and provides good corrosion and limited wear resistance, and has a wide variety of color options based on the Pantone or RAL color codes. The thickness normally vary from 4~12μm.

Type III anodizing also known as hard anodizing, it provides excellent corrosion and wear resistance which is suitable for functional applications, but the color options are very limit which is often clear or black only. The typical thickness is 30-125 μm.

Powder Coat

We can do powder coat in white, black, grey or other pantone colors. Powder coat adds a thin layer of protective polymer on the surface of the metal steel and aluminum parts. It uses corona discharge phenomenon to make powder coating adsorbed on the prototype, which is a strong and wear-resistant finish. The typical thickness varies from approximately 50 μm up to 150 μm.

Metal Plating and Metalizing

Plating of Tin, Nickel, Zinc (galvanizing), and Chrome are all common plating metals. It is a plating process that applies a very thin layer of another metal or metal alloy, in order to protect from corrosion and oxidation of the base part, or to change its cosmetic appearance on the metal parts.

For metalizing, we can do matte and glossy vacuum metalizing and water metalizing in silver color or other colors. It offer a better cosmetic than paint and scratch resistant.

Printing & Etching

BP can print custom text and logos on the parts. Silk screening can be used for larger surfaces and when mixing multiple colors for even more complex graphics; Pad printing can be used to print on curved surfaces; Laser etching is ideal for making precise and permanent marks on metal or some plastics which are in narrow structures.