What's Out West?
Besides the beautiful mountains and California sunshine, a nice pocket of moldmaking activity lives out West! And this tightknit community rarely misses this once-a-year opportunity to network with new contacts, catch up with old industry friends and win those infamous raffle prizes! But an important highlight of the event is the half-day conference MMT has helped organize for the past two years.
MoldMaking Technology (MMT) once again sponsored the annual SPI Western Moldmakers Mike Koebel Trade Fair earlier this month in California. Senior Editor Cyndi Kustush and I headed out to Pomona for a week of customer visits, shop tours, an SPE Mold Technologies Division (MTD) Board meeting and the 25th anniversary of SPI's Moldmakers Trade Fair, which had more than 200 visitors from local moldmaking and molding facilities and educational/training organizations.
For the second year, MMT along with SPE MTD helped organize a free afternoon technical workshop (click links for PDFs of the presentations), which included Stratasys Applications Engineer Mark Bashor discussing plastic injection molding with 3D printed tooling. The program also offered a session on ultra-thin film coatings by Don Corbett, a product manager at Oerlikon Balzers Coating USA. Corrosion-resistant stainless steels was another hot topic. Bohler Uddeholm's Technical Manager Jim Kaszynski, and John Merlino, Regional Manager, broke down various mold steel grades. And last but not least, was how to build a well-designed maintenance plan by Progressive Components' Jose Flores.
The afternoon continued with the trade fair, and the room was bustling with wall-to-wall activity around the buffet-style dinner and supplier tabletops showcasing tooling and molding technology, products and services. The annual raffle prizes were a hit once again. The event happens each fall, so mark your calendars.
Click the image below for a slideshow.
