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316L is usually the first choice for medical manufacturing but it is not the only stainless steel that is available for healthcare applications.

Other grades of medical stainless steel may be better suited for your purposes and/or more cost effective.

But let’s start with 316L. Here is why it is the ‘go-to’ stainless steel for most medical applications…

Plastics can be harder to machine than metals: they can be less forgiving. Machining plastics requires specialist expertise – the kind that comes only with years of experience.

But that’s just half the battle. Not every plastics machining specialist has the experience needed to meet the stringent requirements of medical equipment OEMs.

Choosing the right machining partner for medical applications is vital to ensure quality, consistency, validated processes and traceability of materials.

Medical devices are critical products: lives depend on them. Your company’s life-saving products rely on the quality of the components you specify and the validated processes of the suppliers you appoint.

Consistency of quality is crucial. Your suppliers must maintain that quality while hitting production deadlines with unerring precision.

But you and your team are still under huge pressure to keep costs down; it can feel like a never-ending conflict of priorities. And yet many of those costs should never be there in the first place.