News

Team 1 Plastics Installs New Molding Presses

Team 1 Plastics, a plastic injection molding company for the automotive industry, continues to expand and upgrade its production capabilities. In the past few months, the company has purchased and installed three new injection molding presses.

Two of the new presses, a 60-metric ton and a 100-metric ton, have replaced smaller and older presses. The other new press, a 30-metric ton, expands Team 1’s production capacity.

Replacing aged presses is part of Team 1 Plastics’ continuous improvement. In a recent interview, Tim Henry, Manufacturing Manager, said that there are several factors that are considered in replacing a press. “From a risk management stand point, we consider run hours on a machine, available capacity in a class, projected capacity in the class, and access to components.”

When Team 1 Plastics is considering replacing an injection molding press, the company researches “what new technologies exist and how they could best serve our needs for our industry.” For example, Henry said that options like “repeatability of the injection process (electric vs. hydraulic) and the ability to lock out parameters so the set-up technician cannot make changes above the allotted specifications” have been factors in the decisions to purchase new presses over the last few years.

Team 1’s three new presses, all Sodick GL series, are equipped with “a proprietary two-stage V-Line method for plasticizing and injection functions” according to Sodick’s website. This system “… eliminates the check ring. Prior to injection, the plasticizing screw is indexed forward creating a positive shut-off (exact dosing). This action prevents any opportunity for back flow of molten material back into the melt.”

Henry said that the plunger style injection system of these new presses “greatly improves the quality of the part by reducing possible contaminants that you’d normally get with a traditional ‘check ring’ style machine. We can run a wide variety of materials through the machine without seeing the type of post-purge material issues that we had with the old machines.”

Not only is parts’ quality enhanced, there is also cost savings. This new technology “… saves key minutes during changeover when transitioning from a dark material to a natural or lens material, providing huge savings because it greatly reduces the number of purge cycles.”