Dies, Machines Custom-Made

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31975, 30 April 1969, Page 9

Dies, Machines Custom-Made

The moulds or dies used by Plastic Products, Ltd, in its blow- and injection-moulding operations are all custommade at the company’s engineering facility in Hamilton. The facility, in effect, comprises three sections—a toolroom, which makes new moulds; group engineering, which devises and makes new production machinery; and service engineering, which maintains the company’s manufacturing plants. Some 35 skilled engineering craftsmen are employed in the toolroom manufacturing high precision moulds to customer's requirements. Development and production of a single die for plastics moulding can cost up to $lO,OOO, and Plastic Products must keep several hundred dies in stock. Much of the company’s production machinery is designed and made by the group engineering section, which is also constantly seeking ways to improve existing equipment. Plastic Products sets a premium on brains, technical ability and inventiveness, and always encourages new ideas. It is currently training more than half the total number of plastics apprentices in New Zealand. Even the most

apparently impractical ideas are carefully studied and tested. Such exploration can reveal original concepts or new avenues for research. New Zealand is famed for its ingenuity in manufactur-

5 ing equipment or devising I methods for producing ecoi nomic short runs geared to r its small markets—necessity being the mother of invenr tion. And nowhere is this • ingenuity better illustrated

! than at Plastic Products in the design and construction i of equipment which it could not always import—such as its screen printers which ; have themselves been exported, mainly to Australia