Although our company exclusively develops & sells Asaclean Purging Compounds, we bring a level of service and resourcefulness that extends far beyond purging issues. Every week you read about the benefits of purging and how our products can save you money. Today I’m going to discuss a much less discussed part of what we do--customer service.
Our team collectively has hundreds of years of processing experience. We obviously bring purging expertise to the table, but this experience lets us bring so much more value to our customers. Here’s a great, recent example that effectively illustrates the importance of experience.
Several months ago, I visited an injection molder on the west coast. I visit fairly regularly and typically the Plant Manager and I go to the molding department and discuss production. On this particular visit, upon my arrival, he brought me directly to the tool room. He was having a serious problem with a family tool and wanted to see if I could help him address the issue.
He explained that he was struggling with sticking in the “A” half of a mold. This particular tool was made outside of the U.S. and a mold flow analysis was not performed prior to cutting the steel. While I cannot discuss on the specific parts being molded, I can describe the mold in better detail. There were three parts in this tool. Two of them were large and identical and created a handle. These were opposite a third, smaller part.
After looking over the tool, I understood that they were most likely experiencing an ‘over-packing’ of plastic in the smaller cavity. This led to this portion sticking while the other two cavities barely filled. I don’t advise welding or cutting steel until you can prove what’s happening in the tool. But in this situation, I quickly recognized that they had a large 3/8” round runner going to each area of the tool.
In a past life I came across this issue frequently and therefore had a unique advantage helping them troubleshoot. This runner had several knock out pins that push the plastic out of the tool. I recommended they try to extend one knock out pin on the side of the smaller part into the runner in order to slow that side of the tool from filling too quickly and over-packing the part. This allowed the plastic to evenly fill the tool so that pressure would be consistent throughout. This led to the parts knocking off the core more easily and stopped the sticking in the “A” half of the tool. With a few tweaks in the tool, they were up and running good parts in no time.
Using my past experience in processing, I was able to solve a customer’s problem completely unrelated to my visit. Though I was there on Asaclean business, this illustrates just how much of an asset experience can be when taking a more holistic look at your process.
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