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Engineered Plastics Internal Innovation: A Success Story
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Engineered Plastics manufactures parts for a number of suppliers who require brass inserts to be installed in a molded plastic part.
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EPC was not satisfied with the traditional method they had been using to install brass inserts in their injection molded parts. They felt ultrasonic welding was not an effective solution because the process left brass dust on the part, and the cost to install inserts individually was cost prohibitive because it required an off line assembly operation.
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Initially, EPC developed a fixture that would allow them to ultrasonically weld five inserts at a time. However, this method was not successful because the inserts could not pass the pull-out force test. So, EPC went back to the drawing board. The result was an innovative heat-staking process using a fixture designed in-house to heat the metal inserts and push them into the finished part. This new method produced a part which exceeded the pull-out force requirement, eliminated brass dust, and saved money by enabling the inserts to be installed in-line at the press within the manufacturing cycle. Recently, EPC refined the heat-staking process even further to reduce cycle times without a decrease in pull-out force and reduce their scrap rate by two percent, saving thousands of dollars yearly.
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