No backup mold. One breakdown. One road trip. One donut spare. All in a moldmaker’s weekend. Source |Canon Virginia 

High volume production, no backup molds. Is anyone else familiar with this scenario?

When you have a need to run a mold six days a week to meet sales orders, this is a good thing. When the mold only makes it four days before punching out for the week, this is not a good thing.

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Most of my Thursday evenings consist of getting ready for the weekend. Thursday night football, family dinner night with the kids or just relaxing. This week, I would not get to enjoy any of these wonderful things.

The molding department was seeing consistent short shots on the parts. Everything machine-side checked out. The processing conditions were correct and the cushion on the machine was consistent with no screw rotation during injection. Where was the plastic going?

We decided to pull the mold to see what was going on. A brief time later, we knew exactly where the plastic was going. The entire hot half was full of plastic. There was plastic in places it was not supposed to be. A lot of plastic!

There was only one thing left to do. Grab a colleague, load up the family truckster (I mean the company van) and head north to our supplier that has the capability to manage such emergencies.

The trip north was uneventful. A tank of gas, a few cups of coffee and we were there. We unloaded the manifold, drops and pretty much everything else in the hot runner system. All we could do now was wait and try to get some rest.

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always go according to plan — but that’s where the human side of manufacturing shines. So, the next time you’re stuck or something throws a wrench in your plans (perhaps even literally), reach out to us because Canon might be the moldmaking and manufacturing partner you need.

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Twelve hours later, we were on our way back, headed south. An hour into the drive on a dark back road, we ran over something in the road, causing immediate tire damage and immediate tire deflation. This was far from an ideal situation to change a tire … with the extreme darkness, no shoulder to get out of the way and an eerie fog in the air.

Having been in our industry for many years, I like to consider myself somewhat technical with mechanical knowledge and general know-how for fixing things. Logically assuming the spare tire was in the rear trunk area, we had to unload our hot runner system and place it with care on the side of a ditch. All we found back there were the other essential items we needed, like the jack and tire iron. Where is the spare tire?

Much longer than it should have taken, we found the spare and successfully lowered it out of its well-hidden storage compartment under the van.

Did you know that in some vehicles, the mechanism for lowering the spare tire is located in the center console between the seats? Me neither. Thankfully, whoever wrote the vehicle's owner’s manual included this important information.

The spare was successfully installed, no one got hurt, not even the van. We proceeded cautiously the next 300 miles on a wobbly miniature donut tire without issue, making it back just in time for the oncoming first shift to reassemble the mold and save the day.

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