Productive Plastics is honored, humbled, and proud of our dedicated and hard working team members to again be recognized at the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) Thermoforming Division Conference this year with two top awards in the parts competition.
Below is an excerpt from the PLASTICS TODAY article by Clare Goldsberry covering this year’s conference.
The 24th Annual SPE Thermoforming Conference, held in Atlanta last week, provided real proof of just how far that industry has come since 1991. The parts competition in the cut-sheet/heavy-gauge section gave attendees cause for pause, as they looked in amazement at the parts. It was quite different from the first few conferences, held in small hotel venues with tabletop exhibits where most of the parts fit nicely on a few tables.
Over the years, as the conference got larger, so did the parts. One area of the thermoforming industry that has expanded is large-part forming using heavy-gauge sheet. Applications for this process include everything from pickup-truck bed liners to dental chair bases to automotive hoods and medical equipment, MRI machines to be specific.
According to a recent report from Peter Mooney, President of Plastics Custom Research Services (Advance, NC), medical equipment enclosures are increasingly becoming a big part of the thermoforming industry’s business. In fact, many of the large parts being produced today have been converted from injection molding to thermoforming, which is ideal for lower part quantities.
Gold Award – Heavy Gauge Value Added Category
MRI ScannerPart Details:
Utilizing Self Moulding for tooling all 8 parts where pressure formed utilizing a Cast and machined mold. In order to achieve the customer’s distribution of materials requirement all parts utilized pushers to pre-stretch materials.
Using Sekisui’s materials parts where produced in Kydex T. The material allowed for the wall thicknesses required and consistency over multiple runs and hundreds of parts both in production and field replacements.
The 8 parts are using undercuts and formed in mating edges for better line to line fit up. Cast and then CNC cut tools allowed for the precision required to have the assembly fit up after design. The assembly allows for the parts to fit a separate metal frame that comes together at a staging location. This custom hardware reduced the amount of tools required to install and service, and reduced the total time required for install and service (sample does not show hardware due to customer request).
The covers are painted using a PPG High Gloss Paint system. This required a controlled environment that eliminated dust and the paint equipment had to be specially configured to eliminate debris. Regular maintenance processes keep the line able to reproduce an 85 degree plus gloss finish. The center bore represent a finished paint process that eliminates all surface imperfections related to paint and increased the gloss to 98 degrees.
Silver Award – Heavy Gauge Pressure Forming Category
Automated Diagnostic System
Part Details:
Utilizing Baystate Casting and Borke Mold for tooling all 3 parts where pressure formed utilizing a textured mold. In order to achieve the customer’s distribution of materials requirement both parts utilized pushers to pre-stretch materials.
Using Sekisui’s materials parts where produced in Kydex T. The material allowed for the wall thicknesses required and consistency over multiple runs and hundreds of parts both in production and field replacements.
The design of the kiosk had the part fitting to a metal skeleton that required +/- .020 geometric tolerances for the attachment. The full assembly is 7 different parts, this display is showing 4 of those parts.
All of these three pieces utilize undercuts to make formed in seams. Due to the depth of the location of the undercut the tooling loose pieces had to be temperature controlled to reduce the effect of warpage during processing.
The paint is a Sherwin-Williams custom color masked off to only paint select areas.
Both entries demonstrate Productive Plastics’ long-standing expertise in contract manufacturing for the medical diagnostics equipment industry, where there can be many engineering challenges,” stated Evan Gilham, Productive Plastics COO. “So we really appreciate the recognition from SPE for our work with these medical heavy gauge thermoforming projects.
See our press release for additional details.
Summit, hosted by Productive Plastics, you will learn about every aspect of developing a new product or converting an existing project to the plastic thermoforming manufacturing process.You will gain insights about the entire development process, from design to finished assembly, as you engage with industry leaders from each link in the production supply chain.
ISO 9001:2015
