Industry Watch 20341

THE LESTER IN LESTER MACHINES
Although IMM joins them in mourning the death of William M. Lester (97) on March 12, 2005, former officials, employees, and customers of Lester Engineering Co. (Cleveland, OH) say the mainstream media obituaries were either misleading, or downright wrong.

Newspapers nationwide reported that Bill Lester was the Lester who invented the Lester injection molding machine in the 1930s. But our sources say that honor belongs to his father, Nathan Lester, who died around 1956.

“Nathan Lester started it all. Nathan was the heartbeat of Lester Engineering,” says Bill Jaeckel (ret.), once a salesman for Lester and later for Reed. Jaeckel put us in touch with Don Lewis of DNJ Machinery Sales Inc. (Cleveland, OH), a diecast machinery supplier. Lewis was a salesman for Lester and eventually became president of Lester Engineering.

“Nathan Lester started the company and, as far as the injection machine design goes, Bill had nothing to do with it,” Lewis says. “He may have sold machines for his father, but his father was the brains behind Lester.”

Lewis directed us to Paul Orban (82; ret.), who was the second engineer hired by Lester Engineering and who later became its chief engineer. “Bill helped his father, though I’m not sure to what extent,” he says. “His daughter, May, helped, too. She worked at the drawing board. But Nathan was its originator.”

“Did Nate Lester invent the Lester machine? Let me put it to you this way—I would strongly suspect it,” says a former custom molder and Lester Engineering customer, Irvin I. Rubin, a member of the Plastics Hall of Fame. “Bill sold Lesters. I only met Nathan once, I never really knew him, but I knew Bill and I think he must have had an awful lot to do with it.”

Built to Last

Our sources agree that Lester’s toggle machines were remarkable. They say they were the first presses to successfully mold a new material that hit the market in 1937, a material called nylon.Jaeckel says its vertical injection unit design had a lot to do with it. A plunger fed material to an internally heated, torpedo-shaped spreader. “You got a more uniform melt and it rose vertically after the shot. It cut off any stringing, so you didn’t have to pull strings anymore,” adds Lewis. “Also, the machine controls were more accurate than anything out there at the time. They were Barber-Colmans.”

The clamp end was built to last; according to Orban, “Lesters progressed from using tiebars to a solid frame. He experimented with welding the beams together, but the welding that had to be done was too meticulous and it broke. So, Lester went to cast frames.”

“The clamp had a solid steel frame . . . no, I believe it was nickel-alloy steel,” adds Jaeckel. “The platens moved on hardened steel ways guided by steel members inside. As the machines got bigger, he felt he didn’t need such a tremendously stiff frame and went back to tiebars,” Orban says. “But still, the biggest difference was that there were no tiebar adjustments on Lesters. The tiebars were fixed. And Lesters had a single-point dieheight adjustment. We put the tiebars in the clamp, shut it, and they never moved.”

“A customer didn’t have to mess with tiebar nuts,” Jaeckel says. “A big bull gear in the center moved the platen if dimensions had to be changed.”

Premier Presses

Lewis says Lester machines were very well respected in their heyday. Some are still in use here in the U.S. and around the world.

“They were premier machines, especially the Lester cold-chamber diecasting machines. Everybody looked up to them. Unfortunately, they were slow to follow the technology when the reciprocating screw injection unit came in.”

All who knew him well describe Nate Lester as a dynamic individual.

“He was a pleasant man to work with, a chain smoker, and he paced like a lion in a cage in the engineering department,” Orban says. “He was cordial and honest. Nathan was originally a tool- and diemaker. He worked for Reed before starting his own company.”

Noteworthy Deeds

It is not our intention to detract from Bill Lester’s truly notable achievements. Irv Rubin faxed us the record of his service to industry, marking Bill Lester’s election to the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1981.

In the information we received, Bill Lester is credited with the creation of important designs like cam core pulls, wedge blocks, and rack-and-pinion core operations. He was the founder and GM of two custom molding firms and holds original patents on tamper-proof packaging designs.

But it also says he “designed, developed, and constructed first full automatic injection molding machines.” That may have something to do with the mainstream media’s confusion.

John Kretzschmar, chairman of the Plastics Academy, offers his opinion. “The reporter I spoke with had no clue of the industry and knew even less about what injection molding is all about,” he says. “I know [Bill’s] dad was with him in the company, but I honestly don’t know who invented the Lester machine.”

The former officials, employees, and customers of Lester Engineering say they do.—CK

C&A, CHAPTER 11
On May 17, the country’s number one molder, $3.9 billion Collins & Aikman (C&A; Troy, MI), announced that it and all of its domestic subsidiaries had filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, citing mounting liquidity issues and the need for immediate cash to fund its operations. It received a commitment from JPMorgan Chase for up to $300 million in financing in conjunction with the filing.

Charles Becker, C&A’s acting CEO, took the wheel a week before the filing after the resignation of former CEO David Stockman, former budget director during the Reagan administration. Becker was C&A’s CEO for more than 25 years until 1998, and was its vice chairman of the board from 2001 to 2002. Becker says, “We do not anticipate that customers or suppliers will experience a change in the way we do business with them; we have taken steps to make sure that suppliers get paid in full in the ordinary course of business for all goods and services provided after the filing date, and that customers continue to receive the same quality products to which they are accustomed.”

According to Standard & Poor’s, C&A’s total debt is $2 billion. Poor management strategies, rising raw materials costs, and production cuts at Ford and GM are generally credited with causing the bankruptcy protection filing. C&A has posted a reorganization information center on its website, www.collinsaikman.com.—CK

BAYER BEEFS UP SHANGHAI OPTICAL DISK LAB
Bayer MaterialScience has installed complete Streamline II production lines from Singulus Technologies for recordable DVD media (DVD-R) in its Optical Disc Labs in Shanghai and Leverkusen, Germany. Bayer is a major supplier of the polycarbonate used to make ODs.

The systems are designed for mass production of the DVD+R and DVD-R formats. Noting that the audio CD-ROM’s market share went from about 80% in 2000 to about 33% in 2004, Bayer says this investment responds to the increasing diversification of the optical media market.

Some 800,000 tons of PC became OD media in 2004, says Bayer, roughly two-thirds of that in Asia, adding that many manufacturers in that region are currently investing in facilities for mass production of sophisticated DVDs.

The new DVD-R facility in Leverkusen will be used to offer enhanced services to European OD makers. R&D projects in Leverkusen include formats with higher storage densities and optimized new polycarbonate formulations. Bayer MaterialScience’s OD labs in Pittsburgh, PA focus on prerecorded CDs and DVDs, which dominate the U.S. market for OD media.—RN

WEST ACQUIRES THE TECH GROUPBefore the end of April, the wires were humming with news involving Tech Group (Scottsdale, AZ) and its pending acquisition by West Pharmaceutical Services Inc. (Lionville, PA), reportedly the world’s biggest manufacturer of components for injectable drug delivery. Under the terms of the agreement, The Tech Group, with 14 facilities in seven countries, will become a division of West, which has 50 locations on virtually every continent.

Early in April, The Tech Group announced the formation of a joint venture with a certified minority business enterprise (MBE) called Enova (Cincinnati, OH). The venture, called EnovaTech, which will operate out of a 70,000-sq-ft facility in Frankfort, IN, was formed to service consumer products companies with well-defined MBE programs.—CK

MIM IS GROWING
According to a soon-to-be-released study by Business Communications Co. Inc. (Norwalk CT), the global metal injection molding (MIM) market will grow at an average annual rate (AAGR) of 8.4% from an estimated $382 million in 2004 to $571 million by 2009.

North America still holds the lion’s share of the world market. In 2004 its share was 44.5%. However, it reportedly may drop to 42%, growing at an AAGR of 7.1% through the forecast period. But the report says the MIM market in Japan is red hot. It was $112 million in 2004, and an AAGR of 10% is expected through 2009.

The primary MIM markets around the world—consumer, medical, orthodontic, and telecom—will experience double-digit growth, according to the report. MIM applications also are growing in automotive, industrial, and aerospace.

Designated “RGB-306 Metal Injection Molding,” the report costs $3950.

For more information, visit www.bccresearch.com.—CK

CHINAPLAS PREVIEW
Are you heading for the big Chinaplas show later this month in Guangzhou, China (June 21-24)? If so, and if you think you’ll only see low-tech, GP exhibits at the show, think again.

Here’s a couple of what you’ll see:

DEEP IN THE HEART OF THE BLACK FOREST
Early April found IMM zipping along the German autobahn in search of injection molding technology. There was much to be found.

First stop was Meinerzhagen, home of Battenfeld’s big-machine manufacturing facility. While there we caught sight of one partial and one whole IM cell Battenfeld was testing before shipment. One, featuring five molds, two machines, and two Kuka robots, was destined for an auto parts maker in Russia.

Battenfeld also reports that it’s continuing commercialization work on a 1.4-sq-m auto glazing application that will start series production in 2006.

Finally, Battenfeld has moved its worldwide HQ to Kottingbrunn, Austria, home of its small-machine production facility.

Next stop was the annual Technology Days at Arburg’s mammoth HQ in Lossburg, Germany, in the Black Forest. This year’s event brought in 3500 visitors to see the latest IM technology Arburg has to offer. Demonstrations throughout the facility showed multimolding, inmold labeling, gas assist, water assist, metal injection molding, micromolding, and a rarity: CD molding. Don’t get too excited, though. We were told the machine was strictly “a research project.”

The highlight was a tour off the beaten path and into the heart of the facility, where we caught sight of technology and cells being tested before shipment. Glimpsed were machines, molds, and EOAT unlike any encountered before. Alas, photos were forbidden, as were helpful answers to probing questions, thanks to confidentiality agreements Arburg has with its customers.

Introduced at the event was the all-hydraulic Allrounder 370 U, marking the formal introduction of the U Series machines. This falls in line with other Us already on the market: 250, 270, 350, and 400. The 370 in this case is the distance in millimeters between tiebars. It comes with clamps of 450, 600, or 700 kN. One final tidbit was learned as we departed: Arburg says it will never make a machine in China. All machines will come out of Germany only.

Next stop, an hour south of Arburg in the town of Haslach, was Foboha, where we caught up with U.S. sales engineer Lisa Mauro and CEO Rainer Armbruster. This moldmaker extraordinaire is running full bore (expansion to come soon) and has its fingers in more high-tech pies than seems fair. Of greatest interest at Foboha is development of its rotating cube technology (100-plus made so far), which has pushed the firm into a variety of nifty multimaterial projects to mold automotive components, razors, bottle caps, medical parts, and the like.

The most interesting service Foboha offers is complete system testing and debugging—on your equipment. That’s right, you send your machine to Germany, Foboha sets it up, qualifies the mold, and even runs production if you need to fill a gap. This makes for some interesting and tense qualifications when Foboha has multiple and competing customers in-house at the same time.While touring the testing lab, we stumbled on a giant rotating cube mold making . . . well . . . Mauro threatened bodily harm if the product or the manufacturer were revealed. We can tell you it’s a consumer good, it’s new to the market, it’s a two-color overmolded thermoplastic, and it’s pretty cool. More later, when it’s safe.—JS

SHORT SHOTS
Liftport Group is putting a commercial-scale carbon nanotube manufacturing plant into production in Millville, NJ. First production is set for June 2005. The microscopic carbon nanotubes, lighter than fiberglass and potentially up to 100 times stronger than steel, are already used in glass, plastic, and even metal applications. Seattle-based Liftport is developing the first commercial elevator into space—a carbon nanotube composite ribbon extending 62,000 miles into space from an offshore platform in the Pacific near the equator. Mechanical lifters moving along the ribbon will carry satellites and other freight into space.

Cascade Engineering (Grand Rapids, MI), a diversified custom and contract molder, has formed a joint-venture with Surge Medical Inc. (Holland, MI), which reportedly has a strong distribution network, a national sales force, and a stable product line of proprietary medical products. The new venture, Surge Medical Solutions LLC, will design, manufacture, and distribute cardiovascular medical devices from Holland.

Erie Plastics (Corry, PA) has added four new Husky Hylectric 300-tonners to its plant in Szekesfehervar, Hungary. The new machines double the plant’s capacity. A “substantial investment” in its Hungarian plant’s infrastructure, material handling, and auxiliaries reportedly is expected soon. Erie Hungary also has assembly operations and an in-house tool shop to help it meet European demand for domestically produced products.