Tags:Plastic blowing mold making  Industrial mold making Thread mold making

Blow Mold Design and Build Requirements Al Vanover, V.P. of Marketing at Mid-America Machining (Brooklyn, MI)!aa producer of blow molds, trim tooling andother related tooling!astate that depending upon the technology and machine platform, the mold has certaindynamics, which means there must be a minimum obligation on the machinery manufacturer to accommodate.

A mold of a certain size needs to hve a sufficient platen size and clamp force to allow the mold to functionproperly, Vanover elaborates. With w machinery technology and different means of blowing a container, thereare always explorations on how to blow the container faster, exhaust the air and cool the flash, which is themoldmakers!ˉ challenge today.

With higher cavitation machiery and sometimes faster cycletime requirements, we cannot lose sight of those key attributes that make !(R)a good mold a great machine,!ˉ!±continues. !°In the competitive blow moldmaking environmet, we believe value-added is the best ingredient tosuccess. Whether it is the cooling design, the cavity layout, the mold materials or the proprietary technology thatexists, the design process continues to evolve with almost everyproject.Wilmington Machinerys high-sped, small bottle (SB) rotaryblow molding wheel system uses a miniaturized version of thecompany!ˉs mechanical clampng systems!aa technologyoriginally perfected in their larger wheel machines!acombinedwith a proven technique for accurately positioning the clampsand molds relative to each other.

Newman points out that this new technology was developedbecause traditional methods were not yielding productiveresults. !°Some blow moldingmachinery manufacturers havebegun promoting tandem blow!athe process of blow molding twobottles per parison that have been configured in a neck-to-neckor base-to-base arrangement in the mold,!± Newman states.

Their rationale is not necessaril that this technique producesbetter bottles, but that it is the only way to increase output without incurring the additional cost of multiplemachines.

However, producing two identical bottles in a tandem blo process is a problematic challenge, especially with freefalling parisons typically used by shuttle and reciprocating blow molding machines,! Newman continues. Theparison shape is never identical from the top to bottom in the mold; and achieving an identical material distributionin the top and bottom containers can be next to impossible. Additional variation is added by trying to balance andset up four, six, eight or more parisons to be identical. Even with wheel machines the physical variations in bottlesblown in a tandem process can never be totally eliminated.!The new machines system uses a singleparison and individual cavities, instead of tandem, in order to produce thehighest quality bottles with the least variation in material distribution bottle-to-bottle, and with the smallest weightvariation.