Popular Posts: November 2019

You carved up the Thanksgiving turkey, you’ve gotten some great Black Friday deals and now you have all this free time before Cyber Monday shopping. So what do you do?

Why, you catch up on your favorite MoldMaking Technology articles! We’ve compiled the data, and below are the top five blog posts from the month of November. These are the most viewed articles from readers like you, so don’t miss out on what everyone else is reading. Take a look and learn some more about what’s going on in the moldmaking community.

Using Teamwork and Attention to Detail to Tackle Complexity

Many shops tout expertise in the discipline of complex, multiple-cavity molds, but during my visit to Pro Mold & Die in Roselle, Illinois, I learned that it’s the definition of complexity that counts.

Twenty-five employees hustle around a 30,000-square-foot facility armed with modern software, and high-speed machining equipment prepped to deliver 24-hour continuous operation for designing and building injection molds, and die-cast dies. These tools range from small to large complex parts with multiple side actions and plates for the automotive, appliance, household, lawn and garden, and medical device markets.

This shop’s sweet spot is four- to eight-cavity complex plastic injection molds, two-shot (shooting two different materials at the same time) molds and family molds with six or eight different parts. That sounds like complexity to me. Plus, they back every tool they build with a comprehensive 12-month warranty.

When Pro Mold & Die Co-Owner Dave Long talks about mold complexity, he means a lot of moving parts and a level of work that must be dimensionally perfect. “To us, complex is not just tight tolerances. There are a lot of people who can do that. We're looking for a larger part with a lot of moving parts,” Long says.

To read the whole article, click here.

K Show Report: Next Level Efficiency and Control

After my week in Dusseldorf Germany attending the “World’s No. 1 Trade Fair for Plastics and Rubber” along with more than 200,000 other visitors from 165 countries, I walked away with plenty of information, contacts, leads and ideas. However, the most important takeaway was that plastic continues to be an essential and innovative material to consumers, brand owners and manufacturers … and that includes mold builders.

With that being said, a prevalent tagline across the walls and backdrops of many booths was circular economy–meaning an economic system aimed at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources. At first, I wasn’t so sure what this had to do with my little neck of the plastics woods (moldmaking), but after several discussions, it became clear. Recycling, sustainability and waste reduction are not just OEM and molding facility concerns, challenges and opportunities, they impact the mold manufacturer as well.

To read the whole article, click here.

The Meaning of the Five “M’s”

Man, material, machines, methods and metrics. What does this refer to? A suite of technologies, hardware, software and services focused on returning leaked profit to a company's bottom line. 5ME, a newly developed business comprised of the non-machinery units of the former MAG IAS, was started to aid manufacturers of any size in finding hidden profits from production operations.

5ME addresses five critical components – the five "M's" of man, material, machines, methods and metrics – to improve a manufacturing enterprise's efficiency (the "E"). Its suite of technologies, hardware, software and services is applied as an all-inclusive solution.

To read the whole article, click here.

How to Correctly Size a Hydraulic Cylinder

In order to correctly size a hydraulic cylinder on a mold, follow these steps.

1.Train the mold designer to understand the potential maximum plastics pressures, so he/she can accurately calculate the plastics pressures that the cavity surface area will have on the component. Many will look only at pack/hold pressures, when peak plastics pressures must be considered. Also, do not solely base it off the material being used, as there are factors that can drastically impact pressures. If you are unsure then round it up. Note, if you want a robust tool and process then do not ever round it down. Once you have determined the maximum plastics pressures, the rest is easy.

To read the whole article, click here.

How to EDM Steel and Copper Alloy Simultaneously

“Can I die sink EDM two different workpiece materials at the same time?” is a frequently asked EDM question, especially in mold manufacturing where tool steels and copper alloys are often involved. Although plastic injection production molds are typically made from common tool steels, copper alloy inserts are common in detail areas to dissipate heat and improve molding cycle times. The challenge mold builders face is machining the details when the part geometry falls across both materials.

Machining these materials separately requires multiple part setups (one for the tool steel and one for the copper alloy) and additional electrodes for separate burns with different EDM operations. This approach increases machining time for both electrodes’ fabrication and EDM, which leads to higher manufacturing costs. Also, all this added effort could result in the two details not matching up in the mold correctly, causing a mismatch or an out-of-tolerance part that would then require additional machining, or possibly the remanufacturing of the detail inserts.

The question becomes: What do EDM operators need to know to effectively and efficiently machine these materials at the same time?

To read the whole article, click here.