The Spiral Path by Bill Davis and the Plastic-Experts

Injection molding is a unique business/science/art form. The whole history of it is within the living memory of a generation of people in this country that still has a few live members. Figure Day One as the start of WWII, and real commercialization of the process about 1945. We basically invented the commercial business here, just about then. So it is just that much more frustrating to see the US industry losing out to our offshore competition, in part because we don't take the time to recall the lessons learned when the business was not only young, but was essentially brand new and largely dominated by US manufacturers. When some of us started working in the business, even as late as the 70's, you could still go to an SPE seminar (they were a hell of a lot less expensive then) and listen to presentations made by folks who were in at the birth of the industry. Very few, then, were there primarily trying to sell something and using the Seminars as a sales tool. Unlike the current crop of "experts on one item only".

If you were bright enough to take notes and absorb the knowledge, you might even have been able to parlay the education into a career for yourself. I attended every meeting I could manage to get time off for, and as a result got to hear, among others,  J. Harry Dubois speak on the need for a statistical approach to injection molding, how you had to keep meticulous records of molding conditions when beginning a project, so you would not have to relearn the whole process each time that job ran again, and how you had to "do the math" to get to know what was the most you could expect from a particular job, given the mold, the material, and the machines you had to work with. I also got to hear Wayne Pribble give his patented and humorous dissertation on "How to Grow a Plastics Engineer" without giving in to the urge to strangle the guy, and to listen to Irv Rubin extolling the virtues of "tweaking the process" to mold big undercuts in a straight draw mold that in theory should never have released the part from the cavity.

This is not intended as a nostalgia trip down memory lane. What its about is that those guys learned the business, and invented most of the science of it, while running production plants and making injection molded parts every day. What we run up against now, in a large proportion of plastics plants, is the fact that there are almost none of these folks left who have the freedom, and probably not the skills, to do the job that way anymore.

Injection molding at the start, and even into the 1980's was to a great degree the province of the innovator, the inventor, the entrepreneur, who had his own money in the business, and a major motivation to make things work better each day than the day before. Lately, our little company will get hired more often to settle turf wars between different interest groups within a Company than to fix an actual technical problem or advance the science of our business, with upper management looking for any way to cut costs in the face of losing business to successive rounds of cutthroat bidding among those companies looking to maintain or increase their share of a shrinking volume of projects still in this country.

Injection molding here is increasingly becoming a bureaucratic kind of business, lots of politics, lots of personnel issues, and little concentration on just getting the job done the best way you can. Most managers are required to moderate any criticism to avoid confrontation, rather than being charged with the job of getting the best result, even if the process of doing it offends someone or some group. We are failing to learn from the history of our own business, and it's a history that is not even 70 years old!

I bring up the history concern because of having the occasion recently to pull out my old copy of the Plastics Mold Engineering Handbook, (Dubois and Pribble) Copyright 1978, to show a mold designer the formulas on pages 190-191 that needed to be used to calculate the flow capacity required for a mold to properly cool the part so it could someday be ejected from the mold without being a hot puddle in the parts bin. The response to the information was kind of a shrug, and a comment that the man designs molds, not plumbing. Here we are, hired by a client to backstop their folks on a project that could have some serious economic affect on the Company, and we are looking at a condition where the "mold guy" is not at all excited about cooling and how to get the most out of the tool, not being a plumber.

A little investigation brought us back to the "not my function" problem in several departments, with everybody looking to secure and protect their niche in the place. We had the mold guy and his view of life, coupled with production wanting to be able to "set and start any mold in no more than 3 hours", and scheduling looking to "minimize press idle time" by spreading mold changes over all shifts whenever a prior job finished, regardless who in production was available to make the new job start. On top of all that the Purchasing department was constantly at war with everybody over their need to apply "optimal quantity" buying and "minimal shipping" cost standards to resin purchases, regardless what that did to the schedules.

With this kind of arrangement within what looks to be a reasonably high end operation, there is no surprise that our industry is losing work to offshore operations on a daily basis. To begin with, if you have an estimator who does not know what the minimum cure time of a product is going to be based on the published data for the resins in use, he'll guess high because a job that never comes in causes him lots less grief than one that does show up and won't run as fast as the estimate. Strike One. If the mold designer does not look at the shot volume and wall thickness and from that ACTUALLY CALCULATE the cooling water GPM necessary to meet the production rate needed, and then build a cooling system to deliver it, then you won't meet your bid numbers. Strike Two. If you judge production on the basis of a mold setting speed competition, and that results in shortcuts in the setup being taken, again there will be a revenue loss, and maybe the job goes away when deliveries are late. Strike Three. Another perfectly nice injection molding project goes away, or gets shopped overseas.

J. Harry and Wayne would be ashamed to let this happen in their day;  Irv would have fired everybody involved and started over again, with people who could  "do the math", never mind the Chinese taking the work away.

A small suggestion. Learn from those "Old Guys" who did it all before, and invented a whole industry out of necessity, and thoughtfulness, and a desire to get it right, from one end to the other. They made all the little pieces into a workable whole, largely by the kind of bottom line teamwork that we see less and less here, and by contrast more and more from those offshore guys, who learned most of what they know from READING OUR OWN INDUSTRY'S BOOKS!