Injection Molding

The New York Times Editorial Board has weighed in strongly in favor of the 2.3% excise tax included in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often referred to as "Obamacare". The New York Times also criticized the medical device industry for its multi-million-dollar attacks on the tax as well as many U.S. Senators for not bucking industry lobbying.

The biggest and splashiest exhibit at BIOMEDevice in Boston this week was staged by a company that didn't even exist a year ago.

Rethink Robotics attracted crowds anxious to see activities of the new humanoid robot Baxter, which has been a big hit in the plastics processing industry since its launch late last year.

Passenger car front end carriers can now be designed exclusively of plastic, as illustrated by the new Skoda Octavia. The vehicle's front end carrier is made of Durethan DP BKV 60 H2.0 EF, a highly reinforced polyamide (PA) 6 from Lanxess (Leverkusen, Germany) with 60% glass-fiber filling.

Sabic Innovative Plastics has unveiled two new grades of Lexan CFR polycarbonate (PC) copolymers that will help aircraft OEMs, designers, and manufacturers realize new weight-out strategies while meeting the industry's strict regulatory demands at the Aircraft Interiors Expo running April 9-11 in Hamburg, Germany. These compliant materials reportedly enable processors to produce parts with thinner walls, which help reduce interior weight of an aircraft. 

DME Company, a provider of mold technologies to the plastics processing and mold manufacturing industries, is investing millions of dollars to maximize precision and quality for its products, with the recent purchase of three new machining systems and plans to buy six more new machines later this year.
   

Liquidmetal Technologies has enough cash to last into 2014 and is currently pursuing three strategies to boost its future cash position, CEO Thomas Steipp said in an interview with PlasticsToday.

"Our revenues at this time are relatively modest, but what we are really measuring is the growth of prototypes going out into the market. We raised money in the middle of last year that is being amortized through equity and that runs through August of this year."

While all the talk of late centers around reshoring manufacturing, Intertech Plastics Inc. created its marketing plan around the value of being a regional supplier. The plan has paid off in customers making the choice to shorten their supply chain and manufacture locally. Last year, as a result of a big increase in business, Intertech Plastics (www.intertechplastics.com) recently invested $2 million in new molding equipment and automation.

Liquid metal injection molding is a potentially disruptive technology for the production of precise, small parts for medical devices. Series production costs are much lower than machining, an advantage that grows as volumes rise. Considerable strength derives from the material's amorphous atomic structure.

Despite the rather gloomy report from the Committee on Equipment Statistics for Q4 2012 released by The Society of the Plastics Industry, business for most hot runner system suppliers is brisk. According to the SPI’s report, there were 1147 hot runner units ordered from reporting companies in the fourth quarter of 2012, a drop of 23% from the total booked in the third quarter of 2012, and down 15% from Q4 2011. For 2012 as a whole, hot runner bookings totaled 5264 units, a gain of 2% when compared with the total from 2011.

Moldmakers as a group have been slow to adopt full-blown enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for their businesses. While many continue to develop Bills of Material (BOM) through their mold design software and track job-related inventory using spreadsheets, IQMS, a designer and developer of manufacturing ERP software for repetitive, process, and discrete industries including plastics processing, offers a new method for these tasks.