Injection Molding

There are many ways to be a sustainable company. In Part 3 of our in-depth look at the daily operations of the injection molding business of Xten Industries, our focus is on green design for more efficient manufacturing.

Xten Industries works hard at keeping its eye focused on productivity, profitability, efficiency, sustainability, and solving customers’ challenges with creative solutions. Opportunities for all of these exist in the various stages of the mold/molded part design, material selection, and the molding process chosen.

Medical device molder Pacific Plastics & Engineering, a contract manufacturer and custom injection molder, added another stand-alone 1000-ft² Class (7) 10,000 cleanroom within the facility’s existing footprint. The new cleanroom contains automated lines for assembly and secondary operations including pad printing, assembly, and heatstaking. This expands the company’s production line to include two Class (7) 10,000 cleanrooms, the first containing six presses, and five Class (8) 100,000 soft-walled cleanrooms.

Waste is often only tracked within a mold cavity itself—is the part now cooling inside the tool ready to ship or is it scrap? A molder’s investment in material, however, extends over a broader scope of the process, from transferring resin out of the railcar to drying and beyond, reaching all the way to converting bad parts, runners, and sprues into renewed pellets. Out of every 10 lb delivered to your plant, how many pounds do you sell to customers as finished parts?

Hot runner supplier Ewikon’s major focus over the past year has been to expand and optimize its range of hot runner products for medical applications. The result is a broad range of hot runner technology specifically targeted to meet the demands of the medical industry for both high-volume disposables or the production of precision components where safety is a major consideration.   

Vertical injection molding machine supplier Gluco has announced a partnership with Chen Hsong whereby Gluco will be the Hong Kong-based company's exclusive distributor throughout the United States and Canada.  

Charllotte and Bob Janeczko, owners of custom injection molder i2tech, donated the money to their alma mater to fund at least four plastics engineering scholarships annually. The donation is especally significant for the University of Wisconsin-Stout, beneficiary of their good will, as it only began offering a Bachelor of Science plastics engineering program in fall 2008.

Mold Hotrunner Solutions (MHS) introduces Rheo-Pro iVG, an innovation the company claims is the world’s most compact back-to-back valve gate hot runner system. The new iVG is the first and only internal valve gate on the market, claims MHS. Its patented design completely “rewrites the rules” of valve gating technology and opens up endless new possibilities for high-cavity stack molds, swivel molds, and multi-material injection molds.

Restriction to flow is the problem of the day.

The plastics processing industry in the U.S. remains under pressure by most accounts, but there's been a definite uptick for many, among them Anchor Plastics. The small custom molder has rebounded hard from last year's drop in sales and is looking to hire.

New to purging compounds? Or an old hand but know you could use a refresher? Here some best practices or troubleshooting tips beyond the set of basic purging procedures.