Old molds made new again

Blackwell Plastics, an injection molder in Houston, TX, has accumulated more than 2000 custom-built molds in its nearly 70 years of producing a variety of consumer, medical, and industrial parts. As new products are developed and companies move forward, old parts and products become obsolete and their molds are left on the shelf to collect dust. Jeff Applegate, president of Blackwell Plastics, decided that these old tools could still be good for something.

“Many of these molds, which made a whole range of parts from small to large, had deep draw and long strokes,” he said. “In many cases we can use the existing base and simply insert new cores, cavities, and ejector pins, and we are back in business.”

Applegate explains that some of the companies that own the obsolete molds aren’t interested in taking possession of them. “We’ve even tried to charge for storage to get them to take them off our hands,” he says, “but many companies are no longer in business or they were bought and sold several times, making it difficult to track down the owners.”

Sometimes it’s possible to locate these companies, but sometimes it’s not. “We first try to disposition the mold any way we can. We put out notices to try to get in touch with them, and we try to be extremely careful about which molds we finally reuse,” says Applegate. “It even states in our contract that we’re not responsible for the mold after a certain period of time, but we’ll still make every effort find the owner if we have a mold that we think we can reuse.”

Blackwell has 30 injection molding machines with 22-600 tons clamping force, so the mold “assets” the company has accumulated in its warehouse have a lot of value, although Applegate has reused only a small number of molds so far.

During the recent tough economic times, Blackwell reached out to its customers to help them find creative and cost-effective ways to develop new parts and products using the old molds. In most cases, Blackwell retains ownership of the mold base and charges only for the inserts and labor to modify the mold. “Ideally we’d love to use this to stimulate new business from these customers that we haven’t heard from in a while,” Applegate notes.

While reusing the good parts from old molds such as mold bases and other components, Applegate points out that it’s really not a cheap way to get new molds. “The old mold has to be a good match for the new parts, so we look at whether parts are similar in size and layout. Where we can use 80%-90% of an existing mold, we can refurbish and rebuild that mold rather cost effectively. If I can’t use that much of the old mold, the cost to get it to accommodate a new part wouldn’t be all that cheap. We try to categorize the obsolete molds so we know what we have, and then watch for something where we can get a good fit. If that happens, we can almost drop the new cores and cavities right into the old mold.”

Mold refurbishing helps keep costs down for customers who need to produce new components or products. “The repurposing of old molds is a good strategy for lower-volume parts and can pave the way for lower part costs and higher margins for our customers,” notes Applegate.

Applegate notes that salvaging old molds means reusing mostly the bases, blank pocketed cores and cavities, and waterlines to provide the beginnings of a new mold, much like mold base companies do. “We’ll still have the labor,” he adds. “If we can use an obsolete mold for a new mold, we’ll do that, or we can sell the whole mold if it makes a product. A lot of the molds we have here just make various components for products, so they’re not really anything a consumer can buy.

“Not all molds will be able to be salvaged and many will end up in the recycle bin, but there are hundreds of injection molds that, with a little clean-up and modification, will breathe life into new plastic components and hopefully help the struggling U.S. economy.”

Aftermarket computer parts give molder a start
Ken Jones opened Integrated Molding Solutions in Houston, TX in 2003. Jones, who was working for a molder in the area that changed ownership several times, says he got talked into opening IMS by Compaq Computer (since purchased by Hewlett-Packard).

“I was looking for work and knew the Compaq molds from working at my former employer,” explains Jones. “They’d moved the molds and weren’t happy with their current suppliers, so I agreed to take obsolete tooling from another molder that went out of business. The Compaq projects were still alive, because a computer refurbisher needed aftermarket parts. I ran limited production parts—Compaq called it ‘service requirements’ for people fixing the older computers. That’s where we’d come in—run old, obsolete parts to fix these older-model computers. We still do a little service for H-P, but not as much as we used to.”

Jones says that he salvages the bases and other components such as gibbs, wear plates, and leader pins and reuses them to build new molds. Currently, IMS operates 13 injection machines with 40-390 tons clamping force, and employs 25.

“We are also a woman-owned business,” adds Jones, explaining that his wife, Teri, owns the company. “We do some things for H-P because we’re located just over a mile from their manufacturing facility here, and we have an invention or two that we make and sell. We work with inventors and make products such as infant bowls, self-feeding bowls, and spoons for toddlers, in addition to industrial products for the oil field industry.”

StarMould sells, rents obsolete molds for consumer products
One molder has no trouble selling molds for obsolete products. StarPlast, a molder of a range of kitchenware, tableware, lawn and garden products, and household items such as laundry baskets, buckets, and food containers, finds buyers for these obsolete molds through its  StarMould subsidiary.

Yvonne Famini, export manager for the company, says that an auction of these molds in Miami, FL in March was very successful, with the company selling all but four of its available 275 molds. On Oct. 29, during the K show in Düsseldorf, the company held an auction in nearby Dormagen to give show attendees the opportunity to pick up some molds at bargain prices.
 
StarMould has 4500-5000 used molds available at any given time. The company, which is based in Haifa, Israel, molds thousands of housewares and consumer products, and while many of the molds it auctions off are from its own obsolete product lines, the company also buys molds from other consumer products manufacturers.

“Many times the quantities of our products are large at first, so we’ll make as many as seven molds, and then demand dwindles so we no longer need seven molds, so we’ll auction them,” explains Famini. “Sometimes we’ll take certain products out of our catalog, so we have to make decisions as to which products to keep and which to discontinue. We periodically shed some molds and products because customers expect new things.”

Many companies that mold similar items know about StarMould and call the company when they have obsolete molds they want to sell. The auctions are held so the company can get rid of a lot of molds at one time. Because StarPlast has its own moldmaking facility, all the molds the company sells are checked out and any repairs made prior to the sale to ensure they work properly.

Customers interested in purchasing molds at the auctions can also bid online. The next mold auction is scheduled for March in Miami.

Icon injection molding refurbs molds for major customer
When products are not obsolete, but the tools are in such bad shape they can no longer make good parts, salvaging the molds might be an option. Icon Injection Molding Inc., a Phoenix, AZ-based custom molder, helped one company save a lot of money by refurbishing molds that make approximately 50 different part numbers for a pool products company.

The Phoenix-based pool company makes its own products, such as in-floor pop-up heads for automatic pool cleaning systems. The molds had been running at another molding operation and there were problems with the components.

“The molds had been built to subpar specifications in the first place,” says Danny Kleitsch, co-owner of Icon with his two brothers. “There were no safety mechanisms to prevent collisions, slide carriers had galled, and there was no guided ejection or parting line locks. Additionally, the molds were running in a facility near the ocean in which a lot of PVC was being run, so these molds were in pretty rough shape.”

Because there were so many molds, Icon invested in the program to refurbish the molds, providing the mold rework at a discount in order to capture orders for upcoming new molds. “We did quality work to get these molds in good working order, and the pool company recouped its investment in the first month’s production,” says Kleitsch.

Another company, Dillon Precision, a manufacturer of ammunition reloading equipment, had problems with poor quality parts from its molder. The main issue was flash due to mold wear. At the recommendation of a colleague, Scottsdale, AZ-based Dillon transferred 144 molds to Icon, which repaired Dillon’s deteriorated tools at its in-house mold facility.

The tools were then processed on Icon’s electric and hybrid molding machines using a 28-step scientific molding technique. This resulted in a 43% improvement in quality for Dillon and a 20% cost reduction on the purchase of molded components due to cycle time and process improvements. Mold uptime was improved by 40%, and Dillon once again had good-quality parts for its products. —Clare Goldsberry