Tech Mold Inc.
When Bill Kushmaul founded his company in 1972, he knew exactly where he wanted to go – Tech Mold Inc. would specialise in multicavity moulds of the highest quality with changeable inserts and long service lives. Located in Tempe, Arizona, a little off the main highways as regards American industry, the company’s success depended on excellence. This has been achieved. Moulds from Tech Mold are producing injection mouldings in a never ceasing flow worldwide. One example of this is a mould that, in a six-second cycle, produces six million parts a day – and has now done so for 15 years!
High efficiency electrode manufacture – 5-axis grinding machine, measuring machine, WorkMaster and Tech Mold’s SCM system.
“In a highly competitive industry such as ours, you always have to be smarter and faster,” explains Bill Kushmaul. “Here, at Tech Mold, we have moved from ‘mould making’ to ‘mould production’. Craftsmanship has become high technology. Artists have given way to well-qualified designers, programmers and operators. Our moulds seldom have less than 32 cavities.”
Tech Mold’s design team has many years’ experience of various types of moulding tools and offers creative designs that answer the production needs of customers. Innovative designs with tight tolerances and total replaceability of constituent components are the key to success.
Heavy investment in research, development and modern machining technologies continues to strengthen Tech Mold’s manufacturing capacity. Efficient machines that have robots in automatic productions cells and a factory-wide control system ensure the precision and quality of manufactured components.
Bill Kushmaul: “It’s a question of exploiting the machines’ inherent capacities and all the hours of the day – systemising and streamlining.”
The development and production of each mould is documented down to the smallest component and, for servicing and maintenance, is saved for at least 20 years. To be used as the customer’s reference manual, a booklet is produced from this documentation and supplied with the mould – lifetime monitoring is part of the total service offered by Tech Mold.
“We came across System 3R as early as the 1980’s. Our EDM machines were, of course, precise and efficient when they were producing. However, the manual tooling of electrodes in V-blocks was incredibly time consuming and repetition accuracy was non-existent. All tooling time is unproductive. System 3R’s Mini system was the answer. Tooling times were reduced from hours to minutes,” reveals Bill.
Shortly thereafter, Tech Mold was one of the first companies in the world to equip its die-sinking EDM machines with System 3R’s automatic electrode changer, 3Robomatic. Originally, the magazines held 8 electrodes, but were soon enlarged to take 16, 24, 32 and, finally, 48 electrodes. When one EDM operation was completed, the machine sent a signal and a new electrode was fed in. This continued until the job was finished. Night-time unattended machining for large jobs was now a reality.
Bill Kushmaul: “Quite simply, ever since our first encounter, System 3R’s products have been pillars of our operations.”
True to the goal of being at the forefront of new technology, Tech Mold set up its first fully automatic production cells at the beginning of the 1990’s. A number of die-sinking EDM machines were upgraded from the Mini to the Macro system and equipped with System 3Rs first robot, WorkMan.
For unattended machining at nights and weekends, the robot’s magazine was loaded with electrodes and workpieces that were palletised exclusively on Macro. All the high expectations were met by the investment. The machines’ burn time more than trebled. On average, something over 91 percent of available machine time is being used. The record in a die-sinking EDM cell is 62 days of clock-round production!
The inserts in all the moulds are replaceable. Inserts have their sides ground perpendicular while in their Macro holders.
Robotisation has continued with WorkPal for automatic changing in grinding and milling machines. Macro, a constant feature in all of this, is standard equipment for all the workshops’ machines (lathes, jig grinders and measuring machines included therein). In total, there are over 7,000 Macro pallets circulating around the factory floor.
It can be said that the heart of the factory is the automatic cell for manufacturing copper-impregnated graphite electrodes. This cell is a Mitsui Seiki VL30 and a Zeiss Contura supported by System 3R’s WorkMaster. Technical development has now enabled the production of electrodes that are considerably more complex than before. The Electrodes can have up to 120 different surfaces, all within 3 µm.
Here too, Tech Mold uses an in-house developed manufacturing technology, SCM (Self Correcting Manufacturing). The electrodes are milled and then sent to a measuring machine where they are compared with a 3D model. Should an electrode’s measured values be outside the tight tolerances, it is scrapped if there is no possibility of corrective machining. If there is, the correction values are transferred automatically and the electrode returns to the milling machine. The electrode is corrected and then goes through verification once again.
High efficiency electrode manufacture – 5-axis grinding machine, measuring machine, WorkMaster and Tech Mold’s SCM system.
Manned by a single operator, this automatic production cell is operated all day round, seven days a week. There are two reasons for this. One is to feed five hungry die-sinking EDM cells. The other is to respect the old adage: “machines that should be running, do best when kept running”. In other words, cold machines give different results than do their hot counterparts. For Tech Mold, the requirement that repeat components are identical is absolute. The company is synonymous with precision.
Bill Kushmaul: “In fact, I believe that neither the market nor System 3R have realised the Macro system’s full potential. As standard, we use Macro’s 90-degree indexing to grind the sides of inserts. The results are within 2 to 3 µm – every time!”
printer friendly version