Oral care products: focus on accuracy and precision

Manufacturing accurate and precise wooden oral care products requires the right machinery and technologies as well as competency and a deep knowledge of wood.

Especially when producing big lots of products, you need to be consistent, ensuring the same quality for each single item.

How do you achieve these goals? Let’s discuss the topic in the following article.

How to get accurate and precise oral care products

If you want to add wooden oral care products in your catalogue, the most important aspect to consider is the choice of wood manufacturer.

First, you should know if the company is equipped with:

• automation systems
• made-for-purpose machines
• sophisticated software
• technologically advanced tools
• dedicated production lines
• employees with deep experience

If not, they can’t guarantee top-quality, accurate, and precise oral care products.

You should consider that wooden toothbrushes and interdentals are very small items, and wood makes the production process even more complicated, as:

• each wood essence has different structural limits and tolerances that must be respected during the design phase
• wooden blocks may have certain standard dimensions, and they would need some modification to optimize the material
• some designs and shapes could be very difficult to replicate without disturbing the original project

Only a competent supplier has the latest technologies and CAD-CAM software to create complicated designs as well as the essential competency to select the right type of wood for each specific product, giving advice to create a product that is functional and aesthetically beautiful at the same time.

Either starting from a sketch, a physical sample, or a concept, the ideal supplier must cooperate with you, providing consulting services, a design constraints analysis, an estimate of price, and a 3D design before moving on to production.

The prototyping phase is crucial

Being able to see and touch representative prototypes of the final product is the only way to predict possible problems and correct them before production. Besides obtaining more precise objects, this lets you save time and resources, solving issues in advance.

Moreover, if the manufacturer creates exact representations of the final product, you will have a precise idea of it and its aesthetic, technical, and functional performance before production, avoiding unexpected surprises.

To obtain an accurate final product, the raw material must also be perfect

The drying process of wood is especially important to create top-quality oral care products.

An expert wood maker has in-house, state-of-the-art drying chambers that guarantee the ideal moisture content of the wooden log before production. It is essential to get:

• a clean milling process
• higher dimensional stability
• less probability of breakage

Material preparation also affects the accuracy and durability of the finishing process. Only properly prepared material can be customized with a wide range of finishing options that last for a long time.

Automatic systems, advanced laser finishing centers, and anthropomorphic laser robots—which can adapt to every shape with radial movements and different engraving depths—are also essential to customize each object according to clients’ requests.

Then, final quality control ensures perfect products

Products with complex shapes need precise measurements, which can be very difficult, especially if made manually.

All wooden products should be individually checked with automatic systems of infrared video cameras and tailor-made artificial intelligence algorithms. This can guarantee continuous monitoring of the process with data collection and analysis, providing real-time visualization and dedicated reporting compliant with Industry 4.0 regulations.

Each wooden toothbrush handle should be checked for:

• dimensional and functional aspect (size and shape)
• milling accuracy (missing parts, dents, splinters, breakage)
• morphological defects (open knots, heavy discoloration)

3D laser technology and sophisticated metrology software are a plus to guarantee accurate and 100% reliable measurements: the wooden object is completely scanned with a laser gun; then, the metrology software creates a three-dimensional representation that must be compared with the original technical drawing to verify that nominal dimensions and tolerances are correct.

Digitalized quality control processes guarantee the highest accuracy.

At Minelli, we invest a lot to get the latest digital systems, sophisticated software, and cutting-edge machines to guarantee the most precise and accurate wooden products.

We use only the latest generation of customized and made-for-purpose CNC machines that provide consistent dimensional and finishing results even at a very high production volume.

Thanks to our own Manufacturing Execution System (MES), our company is fully connected, and we have recently implemented new 3D metrology technology that lets us guarantee maximum precision for each production lot.

If you are looking for top-quality oral care products, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Our experts will be glad to help shape your idea.