This informative blog allows plastics professionals to discuss plastics training and technology. Brought to you by Routsis Training: the plastic industry's premiere training provider.
Building on their successful efforts from last year, Trademark Plastics Inc. of Riverside, California is once again investing in employee training in 2019 — including Routsis Training’s SmartTech™ on-site scientific molding training.
According to David Carty, the company’s chief operating officer, Trademark spent $500,000 on training programs in 2018. This year, they plan to spend an additional $250,000 on training initiatives.
Read more at Plastics News.
Get instant access to essential processing information with the Scientific Molding Pocket Guide — created by the plastics experts at Routsis Training. This convenient reference provides injection molders with detailed, up-to-date information about common plastic materials and their properties — including additives, preparation, and guidelines for optimal processing. Steps for establishing and maintaining a robust scientific injection molding process are also covered.
The Pocket Guide includes critical information for identifying, troubleshooting, and solving molded part defects. As a convenient reference, the app also includes part and mold design guidelines, frequently used calculations, and common conversion tables.
The Scientific Molding Pocket Guide includes:
Click here for more information.
The latest edition of Plastics News contains an interview with Andy Routsis, the president of Routsis Training. Mr. Routsis discusses his past visits to NPE, the history of Routsis Training, and important considerations for successfully training a production workforce.
The interview covers common mistakes companies make when training their employees. “Most companies do not understand the importance of sharing knowledge,” says Mr. Routsis.
Mr. Routsis also shares critical advice on how to properly structure in-house training. According to him, successful companies “have a training plan for their entire workforce. These companies put a high value on employees.”
Click here to read the article on Plastics News’s website.
Process monitoring systems are a great resource for the Scientific Molder.
We already have a {brand-name} production monitoring system and are now considering using it to also monitor the process.
In practice most companies use such systems helpful to look for individual short shots or analysis of past problems. This is essentially quality control and is an important use for the system, but not its highest potential.
The important factor is to have a good basic scientific molding process than compensates for normal variation. With this in place, you can then use your process monitoring to identify a process shift. This allows your technician to then go to the machine and determine what changed and its effect on the quality of the process and parts. If used in conjunction with a good process, monitoring can be effectively used to provide quality assurance as well as quality control.
For example, you would rather your system to indicate a change such as a shift in transfer pressure and have your process tech head to the machine to determine the cause. It could be problem such as a blocked cavity, dying nozzle heater band, or it could also be something simple like a material lot change with a lower melt flow. You want your tech to understand what a high transfer pressure could signify, locate the cause, and then determine its significance.
If the change above was due to an equipment problem, the tech would then go about either fixing it or having it fixed.
If the change was due to a lot change in our example above, the tech might need to adjust the transfer to make the short shot the same weight as the standard, verify the quality of the part, and then adjust the process limits (such as +/-5%) to accommodate the new lot of material. The key in Scientific Troubleshooting is the change has been identified and a knowledge-based action was made using actual data with the intent of maintaining a good process known to make good parts for your customer.
The key to the above situation is to first ensure the tech has a good understanding of Good Scientific Documentation, Basic Scientific Processing, and Scientific Troubleshooting. Without this, the tech tends to just turn off or change the alarm because the parts look good, though the process may be different and thus producing suspect parts.
Routsis Training announces the release of thirty-two online courses in French. Six of the courses comprise Routsis’s Scientific Molding 101 grouping, which lays the foundational knowledge base necessary for the success of any injection molding employee and provides them with in-depth processing information to better prepare them for making appropriate and cost-effective decisions when establishing or improving a scientific molding process.
Twenty-six Scientific SkillSet™ courses provide a unique learning experience that combines detailed, step-by-step online instruction with practical hands-on labs and worksheets. Each course/worksheet combinations focuses on developing important processing-related skills that translate directly to troubleshooting, optimizing and documenting any injection molding process.
“These French courses were produced to meet the training demands from multinational companies that have injection molding facilities in France, Canada and Belgium,” says Andy Routsis, President of Routsis Training.
These French language injection molding training programs are an expansion of Routsis Training’s catalog of multi-language courses, which already features training in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Bahasa Malaysia.
The new online courses — and all existing Routsis Training courses — are cross-platform and can be played using any web browser and on any tablet or smartphone.