How to Design Your Own Custom Brush

Gordon Brush®, the leader industrial brush manufacturing, offers over 17,000 different brushes. In addition to our everyday stock of 3,500 brushes, almost 50% of the brushes we manufacture are for custom brush applications. Gordon Brush® has made custom brushes for almost every industry imaginable and applications. These include brushes used in delicate surgical procedures, containing a snake, and brushes to support the United States military, just to name a few.

We can customize nearly every aspect of your industrial brush, including: fillmaterial, brush length, fill length, fill diameter, fill type, stiffness (trim length), density, coarseness, hole diameter, hole pattern, and base materials.

Tufted brushes consist of three main components:

• The core or block: Brush cores are typically made from plastic or wood blocks that feature drilled holes designed for the placement of the bristles.
• The fill material: The fill material of a brush is made up of strands of filaments that are held in place on the brush core by staples, wires, or epoxies.
• The handle: Many brushes also have a handle component which the user holds to work the brush for the specific application.

While the core and fill material are integral to the manufacture of a tufted brush, industry professionals can customize the design of these components to suit different needs. For example, they can choose various construction/fastening methods, bristle shapes, brush types, and more.

Staple setting:  This construction method involves driving the brush filament into drilled holes in the core and holding them in place with steel staples. Staple set brushes are available with a wide range of customization options, including: fill material, tuft pattern, size, and brush shape.

Epoxy Setting:  Similar to the staple setting method, this brush construction method requires the insertion of brush filaments into drilled holes in the brush core. However, rather than setting the fill material with steel staples, they are held in place with epoxy. This method makes a secure brush without staples that can be sterilized for medical applications. Due to the precision required to epoxy unstapled brushes, this method is generally performed manually, resulting in higher production costs.

Wire Drawing: Also known as Drawn-In-Wire, are made in a similar way to staple set and epoxy set brushes. However, instead of using staples or epoxies, manufacturers sew the brush filaments into place with metal wire or nylon cable. The wire or cable is tied around the middle of a filament tuft; the fill material is bent in half and the drawn bend point is firmly seated into the drilled hole before adding another knot to lock the filaments against the base of the brush. While allowing for secure attachment of the fill material, this method requires extensive manual labor, which often makes it more costly than the other two.

Designing a Custom Brush is easy with Gordon Brush®.  Gordon Brush® provides you with several options on how to go about designing a custom brush for your specific application:

1.      On the Custom Brush section on the Gordon Brush® website (www.gordonbrush.com), there are dropdowns corresponding to the type of brush you may need. These include: block, bore, cup, cylinder, disk, flow-thru, hand-held, inward and outward disk, inward wound coil, pencil & applicator, straight strip, and twisted-in-wire.

a.  

    Just fill out the custom brush form and email or fax it to us. Our highly experienced staff of design engineers and customer service representatives will get back to you with a quote.

2.      Email or fax us a drawing along with specs. One of our design engineers will call you back with questions/clarifications prior to providing you with a quote.

3.      Call us…ask to speak with one of our design engineers to discuss your custom brush and the specific application prior to providing you with a quote.

Gordon Brush® will gladly make a prototype of your brush for you to use. The prototype might be expensive, but it will give you an opportunity to try it out for the intended application prior to committing to a larger order.

See how easy it is? So why are you waiting? Contact us today for your custom brush.

If a brush exists, we have it…if I doesn’t, we’ll make it!