Geiss Thermoforming highlights machine flexibility

“I am the boss of the company, so I am never happy,” he said at the Geiss booth N60045 at NPE2009. But he sees now as a good time for the U.S. market to buy Geiss machines, which have been developed to allow flexible operations.

“Potential U.S. customers say to us that before, they would change molds every three days and spend three hours on the changeover, but now they must change at the end of each shift and in just one hour.”

Processors are looking for greater levels of capability and Geiss has sought to answer that need with the development of machines that can do a variety of tasks, including twin sheet and composites thermoforming.

The flexibility espoused by Geiss means that the machine it has developed for composites processing can be switched easily to standard thermoforming operations. So the processor now has the ability to extend their offering from standard thermoplastics into composites.

The company has a patented system that extends closing forces for use with reinforced plastic composites. Servo motor drives exert closing forces of 20 or 31 metric tonnes, and a hydraulic unit can then extend the closing force up to 100 or 200 tonnes.

The presence at NPE is designed to spread the word about Geiss to U.S. processors, but also helping is Sabic Innovative Polymers, which installed a Geiss system at its polymer processing development center in Pittsfield, Mass., to run trials of its composite materials for customers.

Geiss believes in giving customers complete systems, and as well as manufacturing tooling it also makes trimming systems — it claims to be the only thermoforming machinery company to do so. A standard trimming unit can be fitted with ultrasonic cutting, computer numerically controlled milling, a laser or a combination of these. This variety of options is important as processors move into more challenging materials like honeycomb composites, which needs ultrasonic trimming.

Manfred Geiss is optimistic about prospects for the U.S. plastics industry: “The US market was the first to decline in the economic downturn and I have a feeling it will be the first to recover.”

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