Can anyone identify this material or process?

[Steve Clarkson]

Today I was given a small piece of material with a logo on it and asked if I could reproduce it, only much larger. However, I have never seen this material before and have no idea how it was made.

It looks alot like a rubber stamp glued to a piece of felt, but it's not. If you look very closely at it, there is no "floor" like you would have with a rubber stamp. It almost looks like the letters were cut out and glued to the felt......but it must be a "heat process" of some type, because there is no way these letters are ever going to be peeled off.

Here are a few super close up photos.

Any idea how these were made?

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[Doug Griffith]

I'm going to guess that these were cast into female tools with the fabric circle applied while the "rubber" was still in it's melted state.

Or an injection molding process similar to IMD.

[Joe Pelonio]

I would agree with injection molding.

[Richard Rumancik]

I would guess injection molding over the fabric insert. I don't think you would get the crisp detail with a casting. The fabric circle is probably quite porous in the raw state. The fabric blank would be placed in the die, the die closes, and the resin is injected into the die. It will fill the mold and all the spaces in the fabric. Since it is molded in one piece it won't separate. Sometimes this is called overmolding. It is becoming more common to use this process to mold rubber handgrips etc over another molded piece from a different material.

What is this item actually used for? You won't be able to copy the process; probably the best you could do is stack and bond two layers of material but that would be very tedious with all those rectangles on the perimeter, and you would probably not have the functionality and ruggedness of this piece. So I don't see how it could be easily copied and scaled up.

[Glen Monaghan]

I'd agree with the injection molding onto the fabric backing, fusing the two in the process. Can't imagine how you'd be able to duplicate it but, depending on what it's supposed to be used for/how it's supposed to be used, maybe you could offer an alternative such as an etched sheet of rubber stamp material or an engraved foam sheet?

-Glen