Injection molding Cartesian robots are being made lighter and faster, but with greater payload capacity and vibration resistance. Six-axis articulated robots are being made easier to program.
Molds that break speed records for specific applications; hot runners for medical, packaging, and automotive parts; temperature and valve-gate controllers; and standardized mold components constitute a large grab-bag of news in the tooling category for injection molding at the Dusseldorf show.
On Jan. 2, I wrote that Mexico was benefiting from the trend of “reshoring” manufacturing jobs from Asia to North America. New evidence of that trend came in today from PolyOne Corp.
In its first half-century, EVCO Plastics has grown from one half-ounce injection machine in a basement to a $130 million company with 148 presses and 900 employees at nine plants in the U.S., Mexico, and China.
It’s hard to generalize about auxiliary equipment, but a few trends stood out at K, including: greater energy efficiency, ease of maintenance and cleaning, controls that provide more real-time and historical process information and greater ease of use.
More productivity with less energy consumption and capital investment; more operations in the machine or manufacturing cell with less time, labor, energy, and capital—these were the common themes of injection molding exhibits at October’s K 2013 show.