Grinders

[SSalmon]

The company I work for has a small mold department that nobody seems to know much about. They put me in charge of it so I am in the process of learning as much as I can about injection molding.

I have looked for grinders so we would be able to reuse some of our scrap but all I am finding are grinders upwards of $5,000. The company only spends around $3000 on plastic a year so it is tough to justify something so expensive.

Are there grinders out there in a size and price range that would make sense for a smaller mold department/company?

Thank you!

Sean Salmon

[Suhas]

Hi Sean,
With so little material, your best bet it to sell the regrind. There are a few companies that will buy it from you. You will need to google it.
Regards,
Suhas

[rickbatey]

Sean- you can look for used grinders but if you don't know much about molding then you'll just end up with someone else's reject grinder ( read POS!). If you only use about $3K in resin, you'd have to be wasting more resin in the runners and rejects than you're making in good parts. I mean a good grinder isn't cheap and a cheap grinder isn't very good. Maybe you could find someone to toll grind it but still you're not using that much or your resin is very expensive.
Rick.

[SSalmon]

Thank you for the responses, any tips or advise are always welcome!

We are wasting more than we are using on good parts which is why I was hoping we would be able to find something. I will look into reselling what we would end up scrapping.

Sean

[rickbatey]

Sean I believe you turn the scrap thing around with the right people but time wise it may be slower than you'd like. You have to figure out is it machine, mold, man, method, or material that's causing the scrap. Then fix the issue. I'm sure if you can assign a dollar amount to the scrap you'll know where to start work through the biggest hitters.
Rick.

[SSalmon]

Thank you Rick!

It has been a combination of all those variables. The company inherited their mold department more than anything and have been running it for about 5 years. Once they put me in charge one of the owners began training me and he really didn't know much. In fact one of the first things he said after pointing out 7-10 gauges and switches on the machine "we don't touch those because we don't know what they do".

After that I found someone to come in and train us properly and since then our scrap has come down by over 50%, I'm still just looking for more ways I can make this department more efficient and more of a money maker.

Again, thank you for the responses!

Sean