We received a specification from Mecaplast who produce plastic mouldings for several car manufacturing companies.

During the injection moulding process the parts which are produced have protrusions called “Sprues” which require to be removed from the parts prior to shipping to the customers, the specification was to remove the sprues from both the LH & RH parts with tolerances of -0mm & +0.5mm, the cycle time of the machine had to be less than 30 seconds and the parts required to be protected from damage using “A-Surface” nest material, access to the machine required to be free from obstruction allowing the operator to have sufficient room to load and unload the parts.

Using Solidworks we designed a machine which have separate Sprue Cutting devices for each sprue, access to the machine was protected using 3 sets of horizontally mounted light curtains, the machine was to be constructed from 80x80x5mm box section.

Upon acceptance of the above design and adding a feature to provide solvent fume extraction to the machine we manufactured the machine at our workshop.

We designed the electrical, pneumatic, mechanical and tooling required to the specification above, we used a company called PDM who produced the “A-Surface” nest material based on STEP files provided by the customer.

We manufactured the control panels, installed all equipment to the framework and mounted the “A-Surface” nest material to the correct positions on the machine.

Upon successful completion of the assembly we set-up the pneumatic sprue cutters using trial parts to check the functionality of the machine.

We worked with the customer to resolve issues with the sprue length and evacuation of the sprues and to validate the extraction system to satisfy health and safety regulations.
Actual part sizes differed to the previously supplied CAD data, however, due to our experience with plastic mouldings we had designed the machine to be adjustable to accept smaller or larger parts.

We provided production support during all trial stages and full production start-up to ensure a smooth transition to produce full production parts when the warm parts were produced on the moulding machines.

We provided a full Technical file which included, Operator Manual, Electrical Drawings, Pneumatic Drawings, Mechanical Drawings for Tooling & Machine, CE Documentation.

We produced two of these bespoke style machines.