ACH taps Engel for trio of automotive lens molding cells

Bulking up its capacity for automotive lens production is Automotive Components Holdings LLC (ACH), which just installed three new injection molding systems from Engel to help ACH promote fully automated production of multicolored, automotive taillight lenses.

ACH will need the machines to keep up with orders for multicolored acrylic taillight lenses for a variety of Ford vehicles including multicolored wraparound lenses for the 2011 Ford Explorer. According to Engel (York, PA), the trio of machines recently supplied to ACH included one 1000-ton and two specially engineered 1250-ton duo series twin-platen molding machines equipped with rotary platens, multiple injection units, application dedicated automation, and auxiliary support systems.

All three were delivered to a manufacturing facility in Sandusky, OH owned by ACH. Engel's duo range of machines is well established; check here for our coverage of these going back for years to get a feel for their development and the new "tricks" they've been taught since the duo range was first introduced in 1995.

The new wide platen, 1250-ton duo machines delivered to ACH are equipped with three horizontally configured injection units of differing capacities-1300H, 2000H, and 600H models. Automation on them is handled by a machine-mounted viper 60 series rectilinear, Cartesian-coordinate servo-robot from Engel. After the viper robots remove the multicolored molded lenses, these are placed on each cell's conveyor belt for downstream inspection and packaging. Each of the robot's controllers is directly interfaced to the molding machines' CC 200 control systems for ease of programming, monitoring, and operation.

The project called for large, vertically configured rotary tables, so that the platens on both the 1000-ton and the two 1250-ton machines are the same size as those used on Engel's standard 1650-ton molding machine.