Why work with a company that utilizes scientific molding? Balance, intentionality, precision, and most importantly, consistent, high-quality parts. Recently, here at Wepco, we began utilizing scientific molding, and it has already changed the way we operate. I have personally spent most of my career as a tool maker, mold designer, and programmer, so I had not spent much time in the molding department. Over the past year, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the molding side of the business, so I started setting up molds, firing up machines and trying to learn as much as possible so that I could help where help was needed. Once I was comfortable with set ups and startups, I ventured into sampling new tools. This was fascinating to me, but I knew something was missing. I wanted to know the “Why” behind the things that I was doing. Sure, I could get the machine to make quality parts, but it was based on being around injection molding for over 20 years, not because of a process that I was following, and that bothered me.
I knew about scientific molding, and what thought process was behind it, but never had any practical experience with it. I decided it was important, and that it might be in our best interest to develop a scientific molding mind set here at Wepco. We are a small company, but I feel that we are a very progressive, forward-thinking company that thrives on a continuous improvement mindset. The days of saying, “We are too small of a company to do that” or “that will never work here” or “that isn’t what we do”, are over, and are never coming back!
As a management team, we discussed how we would go about moving forward with this and decided to go full speed ahead. The next step was training.
Document your studies, your set up, your process, keep a log at every machine to document your changes so that other techs can see how you have changed things to trouble shoot problems, and list whether they worked or not so that no one wastes their time! It’s simple, but makes a profound difference. These things work and I know because I did this personally and saw amazing results. 95% of the jobs that we reprocess in scientifically, we see the following results:
- Reduction of scrap due to bad cosmetics, black spots, warping, cracking.
- Decreased material usage due to parts having previously been overpacked.
- Reduction in cycle times because we are optimizing the process after quality, consistent parts are achieved.
- Less wear on our aluminum tooling.
The list goes on and on, and please keep in mind that it is not because I am an expert processor; I have only been doing this for a few months. What we have done here is developed a process that works for us and we have been following it and that is it, bottom line.
I did this to learn because I was tired of losing processors and being in a jam, and I had no ability to make an impact because I didn’t know processing at all, never mind any better than they did! So here is what I can tell you now.
We won’t have to be reliant on one person to process ever again. We now have the opportunity to work as a team and share processing knowledge. Everyone that works for me will be able to process in a job very soon, and everyone will be empowered to do so because I owe it to my team to have the chance to be the best that they can be. As long as you can follow a process and go though the steps, you can be a scientific molder. It just takes some practice and a willingness to learn.