About Us
At ClickFold, we make the design and production of custom plastic parts, enclosures, and prototypes fast and simple. Our unique zero-molding method enables us to deliver exceptional products using the most economical operations.
Quick turn-around engineering and just-in-time short production runs are our specialty. No minimum orders and no repeat setup charges!
How fast can we get your project finished? Catalog
ClickFold Plastics in Charlotte, NC, makes plastic parts and custom enclosures for industrial controls and medical equipment. Founded in 2001, the company currently employs a staff of 10 in their 5,000 square foot facility.
Challenge
ClickFold established a strong and growing business by meeting their customers’ need for fabricated plastic components requiring single-color text and markings. In recent years, however, the increasing demand for parts with multicolor markings prompted the company to outsource their printing requirements to a local screenprinter.
“This process can be quite expensive depending on the number of colors,” says company founder and CEO, Patrick Oltmanns. “The majority of our housings are black and our vendor did not have the option to print white with its digital technology.”
Solution
“Realizing the importance of printing multicolor plus white, we decided to invest in our own printer, and so began our search for a high-quality digital color printer with white capability,” says Oltmanns.
In 2009, Oltmanns attended the SGIA (Specialty and Graphics Imaging Association) Expo in New Orleans to research the company’s options. That’s where he was shown EFI’s Rastek T660 UV color flatbed printer, which is designed to meet the needs of the industrial and specialty application markets.
“EFI’s Rastek T660 seemed to be more mechanically sound and it had, not a belt-driven gantry, but a spindle-driven gantry, which gives us more accurate positioning of the print heads,” says Oltmanns. “The grayscale print quality, with CMYK and white print resolutions of up to 1200 dpi, sold us on the printer. Also, the small footprint was a big selling point for us.”
Results
The T660 has been a great success with our customers because of its high-quality output and ability to print multicolor inks at no additional charge as compared to screenprinting,” declares Oltmanns. “Ports can be very small and the resolution of the text is better than with screen. Small registration trademarks come out beautifully as opposed to the challenges with screen and the white coverage is far better.”
Continues Oltmanns, “The printer has brought us much success in retaining customers as well as bringing in new accounts. Purchasing this printer was a leap in terms of print quality and has kept us ahead of our competition. We see growth in our current market and will continue with focusing on industrial applications, for which the T660 ideal. We are also starting to make inroads into the POP market.”