Always Comes Back to the Mold Builder

How important is mold maintenance and repair to the mold manufacturer? Very. Because it always comes back to the moldmaker.

Besides being a highly visited topic area on www.moldmaking
technology.com and a highly attended session at the MoldMaking Expo each year, mold maintenance and repair is a facet of mold manufacturing that comes up often with readers searching for solutions and resources.

Some of the trends, strategies and technologies being discussed nowadays include repair services as an opportunity to new business; finding the right people to do repair work; client training with every new mold purchased; molders cutting costs by eliminating internal mold shops, resulting in a move from preventative maintenance to extended repairs; maintenance from a cost standpoint to uncover the true value of proper mold maintenance and the true cost of ignoring it; and, understanding pro-active versus reactive mold maintenance.

Some specific challenges readers have brought to our attention, which we will cover include the correlation between design and maintenance; case studies of processor practices and strategies regarding mold maintenance policies; a focus on record keeping; customer service or design features that would make life easier for molders, etc.

From its launch MoldMaking Technology saw the importance of mold maintenance and repair in mold manufacturing (Engineer, Build, Repair), and early on we found a key resource: our resident mold maintenance and repair guru for the past 10 years has been Steve Johnson.

His Across the Bench series debuted in January 2004 and his full- and half-day workshops: How to Establish a Systematic Approach to Mold Maintenance at MoldMaking Expo since the early days have both kept the discussion going on this important topic.

He currently works as the maintenance systems manager for Progressive Components, but he was previously a senior tooling engineer for Abbott Laboratories then Hospira, a leading medical device manufacturer in Ashland, OH. His tooling maintenance experience includes 24 years as a toolmaker at Calmar, Inc. redesigning and rebuilding high cavitation, close-tolerance, multi-cavity molds. He also designed and developed MoldTrax, a documentation software system for tracking mold performance and maintenance that enables users to maximize mold performance and repair efforts through a systematic approach to the repair and rebuilding of molds. Check out his article Determining Maximum Mold Cycle Counts.

If you have any specific mold maintenance and repair issues you would like covered, shoot us an e-mail at sales@moldtrax.com or cfuges@gardnerweb.com and we’ll work to get you the answers you need.

So, here’s to properly maintained molds … and the moldmakers who have shown us the way!