PT Blog

At a three-day open house earlier this month, Boy Machines in Exton, Pa., together with 16 partner suppliers, showed off five running machine cells, including a vertical press and the company’s largest and smallest machines. Two of the cells ran LSR and others showed off insert molding and two-shot molding. One entire day’s program was devoted to LSR, with speakers from Boy, RD Abbott, Elmet, M.R. Mold, Kipe Molds, Graco, and Momentive.

The event was attended by CEO Helga Schiffer and others from the German parent company. Demonstrations in the machine lab featured the company’s smallest machine, the all-electric, tabletop Boy XXS (7 tons), outfitted with a cartridge-fed LSR dosing system from EMT Dosiertechnik in Germany. It ran a 0.3 g duckbill valve (0.27 cc) in 30 sec. It was also outfitted to communicate data to a production-monitoring system from Smart Attend. A Boy 35 E (38 tons) ran LSR baby nipples in four cavities and 20 sec with a Graco-Fluid Automation system feeding from 5-gal pails.

This year’s Earth Day theme centers around the Protect our Species campaign, which aims to bring awareness of the growing threats to endangered species, with six of the 14 most endangered species living in the ocean. 

We know that keeping plastic out of the ocean is critical to protect marine life. And last year, I reported on several key initiatives involving turning ocean-bound plastic into viable products. Let’s take a look at new projects and announcements in that area.

For the first time, Amerimold (June 12-13; Rosemont, Ill.) will feature a half-day work shop wholly focused on injection molding in the medical space. The Medical Injection Molding Workshop will address:       

Our speakers bring a wide range of expertise to the workshop, with backgrounds ranging from device OEMs and molders to process training and economic analysis. The Workshop’s speakers are:

Plastics Technology will be closing its Tops Shops survey of injection molding operations on April 30 so your chance to see how your performance in key molding metrics compares to your peers will soon be gone.

You still have time to complete the survey and once you do, you will be included among the molders who will receive a customized report show how your performance in key performance indicators for an injection molding operations compare with other participating molders.

At JEC World 2019, SABIC unveiled a new technology for producing lightweight, cost-effective and recyclable vehicle panels using its Udmax tape—a unidirectional, fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composite. This ‘revolutionary’ technology, which is designed to replace traditional panels made of metal and thermoset materials for interior and exterior automotive applications, will soon be commercialized in the bulkhead of a light commercial vehicle (LCV) produced in large scale for the global automotive market.

The bulkhead’s development resulted from a collaborative effort between SABIC, U.K.-based engineering services provider RLE International, Italian toolmaker AMA Composites, and German weaver Setex Textiles. Vehicle panels that incorporate Udmax tape within the structure have been shown to combine strength and impact resistance with light weight, which can result in mass reduction of interior panels of up to 35% in comparison to metal parts. In case of exterior panels, the composite material can help reduce mass up to 50%. They are produced using a highly efficient, one-shot process of lamination and low-pressure (one-shot compression) molding.