Silicone Tooling and Your Use Case: An Interview with Matt Snell

Interview by Sydney Whalen - 9/10/2025

Matt Snell is both a salesman and an engineer, an ideal combination for anyone working with highly customized solutions. In his over four years at ISM, he’s worked as a Product Specialist, an Application Engineer, and an all-around expert in silicone tooling. Today, he brings this expertise to bear as we sit down and talk about silicone tooling applications and customization options. But if there’s anything Matt wants you to take away from this, it’s that silicone tooling can do more than you think, and the best way to find out if it’s right for you is to just ask.

Follow along as Matt and I discuss the broad ranging benefits of silicone, how they inform continued innovation in industrial and commercial spaces, and the customization potential that rockets silicone tooling high above similar solutions.

A Background on Silicone Tooling

Silicone tooling got its start in hot stamping, but it’s evolved to be so much more. We take a brief look at how and why silicone tooling expanded to serve the packaging industry.

Tell me a little about how silicone tooling got its start.

The technology in general started with the stamping industry, if you will. So, let’s say you needed to stamp an image onto a mass-produced part. A lot of times, parts that are injection molded might not always be super flat, so you need a stamp that could flex with the item being stamped. Silicone stamps have that needed flexibility, working like any rubber stamp but on an industrial scale.

How did the technology evolve to include heat sealing?

Older styles of heat sealing were all metal setups, essentially including a metal base, the packaging you’re aiming to seal, and a metal top. The metal is heated, pressed down on the packaging, and you have your seal. Some companies still do it this way, but around the 80s or 90s, it was discovered that all the same technology that went into good stamps can apply to packaging as well. You’re basically looking at a combination of time, temperature, and pressure.

How has silicone tooling benefitted heat sealing?

Honestly, you can apply a similar solution because you’re dealing with similar challenges. If whatever it is you’re sealing, be it a cup or package, isn’t flat and you’re working with metal, which doesn’t flex, then you could get leaky or insufficient seals. Also, silicone’s heat-resistant nature helps prevent the application of too much heat, which also causes problems.

Understanding What Silicone Brings to the Table

Silicone’s benefits are many and broadly applicable. This jack-of-all-trades of the tooling industry helps solve numerous common issues while also inviting new opportunities.

Let’s start by reviewing those properties of silicone that are universally beneficial.

For starters, we already covered how silicone is flexible and heat-resistant. It’s also reasonably durable and versatile. Silicone can be adapted during vulcanization to have more thickness, flexibility, etc. We also have what’s called thermally conductive silicone, which is still heat-resistant, but better allows for heat transfer. The material’s flexibility, in particular, really opens up your sealing window.

What do you mean when you say silicone tooling “opens up the sealing window”?

I had a couple of customers that were sealing paper packaging. Think of those big bubble inserts inside of Amazon packages, but they’re made from paper instead of plastic. Sealing paper is quite difficult, because it has a very abrasive surface, particularly when you’re sealing 100,000 units. But silicone can work with the bends and folds of the paper creases. With metal, you’d have to jack up the pressure super high to ensure a complete seal.

Your ability to accommodate materials like this is basically your sealing window. A large sealing window means your set up can accommodate a wide range of materials, which is particularly useful if you are working with unusual materials or with a range of materials.

Are there any silicone benefits that are application specific?

Yes and no. Different applications may depend on different silicone properties more than others, but ultimately silicone benefits are application agnostic. It mostly comes down to the ability to handle materials firmly but gently.

Silicone Tooling Applications

Silicone tooling might be popular for packaging, but many of its applications start with thinking outside the box. We explore some common and uncommon use cases and the tools that accommodate them.

What heat sealing applications do you see most often?

Most often, we see pretty standard single-pane heat seal pads. It’s just a flat, plain piece of tooling that presses down on an item to create a seal. They are popular for having versatile applications while also being simple and fast to make.

We see this tooling used in a lot of places, but especially in the laboratory and diagnostics industry. These companies have diagnostic machines for testing patient samples, as during the COVID-19 pandemic. They put fluids in a tray and protect them with a film that’s applied using one or more of these heat seal pads. They then load these cartridges into a machine where the fluid reacts with a patient sample for testing. Because these fluid cartridges often have little capillaries or other textures, they require a more flexible sealing solution – hence, silicone.

What other types of silicone tooling are commonly used in heat sealing?

There are seal bars, which are just that – bars. They are this rectangular shape used for sealing things like chip bags. Then there are heat seal heads, which are typically more contoured than both the heat seal pads and the seal bars. They aren’t necessarily rectangular or circular but customized to the use case.

Rollers can be used for both material handling and heat sealing, typically within the food packaging industry. Trays of food will go down a conveyor with film laid over the top, and then under a heated roller that will seal as it spins.

Gasket, or “insert style” seals can be used for quick changes, as opposed to a full, built-in setup. These are almost always on the bottom – underneath the part being sealed – as a “nesting fixture” to hold the item. That’s your gasket. Then you have your item being sealed followed by a seal hammer or hammer and anvil, which is the heated element that makes the seal.

Are the seal hammer or hammer and anvil also made with silicone?

We advise against combining a silicone seal gasket with top-down silicone heat seal tooling, because both have soft silicone surfaces. This means you have two softer surfaces fighting for control of the seal instead of one hard surface providing adequate resistance. So you can get a pretty sloppy seal.

Outside of heat sealing, what common applications do you see?

Rollers are pretty commonly used not just for heat sealing, but also for material handling. Think of those pitching machines with rubber rollers that push the balls through. Now those aren’t a use case for silicone rollers, but it’s the same principle. The rollers spin together and are close enough to grab material and push it through.

An example of their use outside of heat sealing, so material handling only, would be this one customer of ours who use these for solar panel manufacturing. They use silicone rollers to apply pressure activated adhesives to the sides of solar panels. The silicone is particularly beneficial for them because not only is it flexible enough to handle the panels delicately, but it’s also naturally non-stick, so the adhesive won’t get stuck.

Grippers are also commonly used outside of heat sealing. They are a super common application because they offer soft, non-marring surfaces for grabbing delicate pieces. You’ll see them on the ends of robotic arms in manufacturing setups. You also sometimes see them used as supports. For example, in the decorating industry, you might just need fine holding of fragile elements that need decorating.

What are some more unusual silicone tooling applications you’ve come across?

Definitely early on, I learned a lot on the job about how people were using these tools. They’re used a lot of time in heated environments, for example, even if the silicone tooling itself does not need to conduct heat or is not itself specifically heated. So you need silicone because you need something that will withstand heat in general.

A fun application was in the EV space. This automation company was designing curing towers for a large EV manufacturer. These towers were assembling the batteries for the EVs. One of the steps involved a thermal and pressure activated adhesive for assembling the batteries. They used silicone plates to custom mold the surface to mirror the contours of the battery, so they could get an even seal. That was sort of a heat-sealing adjacent application.

We also get a lot of customers using it for pressure testing. Silicone contours well given its flexibility, so it can create a tight seal for pressure testing things like containers for shipping via airplane.

The Process for Getting a Silicone Tooling Solution

Matt notes that while some customers opt to just by pre-bonded silicone sheets, the best results start with a conversation. Even basic silicone tooling components can be customized to the customer’s use case.

What are customers who come to you for silicone tooling usually looking for?

Usually, there’s two ways our parts get integrated into a system. The first and more ideal way would be to build a solution from the ground up. These people are building a new system, and they think silicone would be ideal for their application. They would reach out to me, and I would essentially design their setup in conjunction with them.

The other side are customers or contract packagers who have now run into issues and believe silicone would solve those issues. These issues include getting a lot of scrap rate, seal bars that aren’t lasting, and the introduction of new material that doesn’t work as well with their all-metal setup. In these cases, we’d have to emulate what they currently have with silicone. So, we’d get diagrams of where the sealing happens and what the seal bars are currently like, and then I’d work with my team over at the manufacturer to get a plug and play solution.

When a customer comes to you for silicone tooling, what are some of the questions you ask them?

I have the customers explain to me their whole application, including what’s happening, where their pain points are, and why they think silicone is the solution. A lot of times, just hearing them talk it through will give me a sense of whether or not we fit the bill and what the part and prototyping might look like.

Big things to know are whether it’s a heated application, and if it’s heated, what is the volume or cycle time? What temp and pressure have they been using in their machinery? If they want grippers, how much pressure can the part being gripped withstand, what are the contours, etc.

We frequently hear about how durable silicone is. Given that, how often do you have customers coming back for parts?

Coming from an engineering background, I like to put a fine point or a nice round number on a lot of things, but when it comes to silicone durability, you really can’t. It’s very application dependent. For example, not all applications are heated. Heat and high pressure can speed up silicone degradation. On the other hand, gaskets that sit on the bottom and aren’t heated tend to last much longer.

The way we address this is by encouraging customers to get what we call a family of foundations. In a silicone tooling component, the foundation is the metal part that connects to a customer’s machinery. The coating or covering is the silicone. We recommend customers get a range of these components so that as one wears out, they can easily swap it out for another. Then they send the worn component back to us to be recoated.

You mention figuring out what the part or prototype might look like. Do you frequently get customers needing custom solutions?

Absolutely. In fact, that’s the majority of what we do. Metal tooling itself tends to be highly use case specific, so any silicone alternative would need to be as well. While we do sell silicone sheets on our website, we encourage people to reach out to us directly to find the best solution.

Custom Silicone Tooling Options

ISM’s silicone tooling solutions are more service than product Matt notes. It’s not a menu, but a methodology for solving unique customer challenges.

What sorts of variations do customers typically require?

Typically, when we look at a new application, we need to understand what durometer, thickness, and levels of thermal transfer the customer might need. Then we look at the blends and pick what we need. Then there’s the question of the tooling component. Are we bonding the silicone to a heat seal, roller, etc.?

What role does the customer’s industry play in this conversation?

We do have FDA silicone for medical and food and beverage applications. The FDA can dictate the silicone durometer, as well as what type of metal it gets bonded to. For example, we often bond to aluminum because it’s affordable and bonds well. However, we can bond to brass, steel, or stainless steel, the latter of which is typically used in FDA regulated applications.

How are you able to accommodate customer variations?

Uncured silicone starts out with this silly-putty like consistency, so it looks very similar, but this is also the stage at which we’re able to choose the specific hardness, thickness, and thermal transfer properties we need. We accomplish this by blending certain amounts of specific chemicals together such that when the silicone is cured through a process called vulcanization, those properties manifest. Vulcanization is also the process by which silicone is chemically bonded to a metal component or piece of tooling.

Is there anything you can do about the life expectancy of a silicone component?

We do a lot of prototyping and testing to gauge life expectancy to see whether we can make changes to promote durability, like in the thickness or durometer of the material.

What other ways can you customize silicone tooling for customers?

Outside of the silicone’s shape and properties, we offer tooling solutions that make changing out silicone tooling components easier. For example, we can design magnetic, quick-release silicone tooling for easy installation. Really, we’re problem solvers and our silicone tooling offerings are more a service than a product catalog.

What sets ISM’s custom tooling solutions apart?

For one, we’re able to resolve customer problems while also helping them keep current hardware. For example, we had a customer – a packaging OEM who makes and sells seal bars to others in the food and beverage industry - whose seal bars were failing much too fast. They set out to find a new solution while avoiding costly changes. I sat down with them and went over their current needs and pain points. We found a design that worked for them and even improved it, making it a double-sided design. That way they could remove it and flip it for more life when one side became worn.

However, our biggest draw is likely the bonding process. When I was at a previous PACK EXPO, I asked some customers what appealed to them most about our silicone tooling products, and they said the fact that they come pre-bonded. And they don’t just mean the silicone and the metal are glued together, which is what a lot of companies do to “pre-bond” silicone. I mentioned before that we chemically bond silicone to metal during vulcanization. The two essentially become one. It’s highly reliable, consistent, and thanks to our customization services, specifically tailored to the needs and tools of the customer.

Matt Snell and his silicone tooling expertise are just an email away. Matt will be at PACK EXPO at the end of the month. Reach out and set up a time to chat about how silicone tooling could compliment your needs.