Secondary operations take a raw or roughly formed part and refine it into a finished product. This includes processes like drilling, tapping, deburring, painting, or heat-treating a casting or molding. These steps add labor and time to the production cycle, so process engineers constantly try to eliminate them by improving the primary tooling.
Heard on the job
The injection molding cycle is fast, but the secondary for trimming the flash takes three minutes per part.
Related terms
Molding flash
A thin layer of excess material forced out of a mold cavity at the parting line.
Die cutting
A fabrication process that uses specialized machines and steel tools to stamp out uniform shapes from flat stock.
Rework
The correction of defective, failed, or non-conforming items during the manufacturing process.