The new tool, branded under the MicroAdjust moniker, officially was introduced by Guill (West Warwick, RI) at the recently concluded K show in Germany. Speaking to MPW at that event were Mark Mulone, global sales rep manager, and his colleague Stephen Blanche, national sales manager. "We had great traffic at this show," said Mulone, with the company seeing strong interest from medical tubing processors, among others.

Guill Tool's MicroAdjust

Those medical processors are the initial marketing targets for the MicroAdjust. The tool is designed to help simplify an operator's work and to help ensure much more precise control of a tube's dimensions. The patent-pending mechanism can be added to the company's Series 712 and 812 tooling. By reducing the number of bolts required to adjust the die from four to two, processors can have an easier time of extruding sensitive, thin-walled medical tubing. Normally, making a change to a bolt on one side of the tool requires a change be made to the bolt on the other side of the tool. Guill's MicroAdjust is designed so that a change to one bolt automatically leads to adjustment of the opposite bolt. Movement is also much finer, just one-seventh of that compared to a conventional concentricity bolt, which ensures less risk of over-adjusting.

The Series 712 and 812 tooling can also be utilized for other complex extrusion applications, so there is a good chance this new adjustment feature will find favor outside of the medical market. Guill makes and markets extrusion tooling for medical, marine, automotive, and pelletized products; wood composites; blowmolding; rubber and silicone; pipes and hoses; wires and cables, food and packaging as well as military applications. We recently reported on the company's new tooling for drip irrigation tubing which enables processing of three-layer drip tubing, so that an inexpensive regrind polymer, or most any type of polymer, to be the bulk of the material inside the tube, hose or pipe.