If I were scaling a mountain peak, I would want to be confident that every member of my climbing team “knew the ropes.” You know what I mean: You want the best people in your plant on those critical jobs.
A brand-new family of thermoplastics for automotive and other markets offers an intermediate range of cost and performance between those of TPOs and engineering resins such as nylon, ABS, long-glass PP, and some modified PET and PBT materials. GE Plastics, Pittsfield, Mass., has broadened its Noryl range of PPO alloys by adopting a new matrix material: polypropylene. New patent-pending technology allows the incompatible PP and PPO materials to be blended so as to create new balances of stiffness, toughness, and heat resistance in a moderate price range. Initial Noryl PPX grades are priced between $1.20 and 1.80/lb.
The Eighties and much of the Nineties were about living large. Now it's cool to be small. Remember how SUVs and TV screens inflated to gargantuan proportions? Today, the macho thing is to have the tiniest cell phone in town.
Have you ever wished you had a secretary to page through each issue of PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY and earmark just the articles related to your job? Well, here's a "virtual" alternative. It's on our website (www.ptonline.com), and we call it the "Zones." It's part of our website's new look that's designed to deliver the information you want more directly.
Help has arrived for overworked plant managers, process technicians, and maintenance personnel. It comes in the form of three new Windows-based "Smart Manufacturing" software modules from Hunkar Laboratories, Inc. in Cincinnati. Hunkar's Smart Manufacturing philosophy is based on the principle of pre-emptive problem solving, which translates into "Fix it before it's broke."
My contact with thermoforming dates back to the fall of 1975, when I wrote my first feature on the subject. What I heard from processors back then was that thermoforming was just beginning to change from “black art” to science.