ONTARIO, CALIF.-Custom thermoformer Ray Products Inc. recently moved to a new facility in Ontario. President R. Bruce Ray said business growth dictated the move to the 50,000-square-foot plant, which gives the company twice the space it had. Ray sold the building at his former location in El Monte, Calif., and purchased the Ontario facility for an undisclosed sum.
The move allowed Ray Products, a heavy-gauge thermoformer, to incorporate its painting operations in the same facility as the forming. Ray operates three paint booths.
The company also added two five-axis, computer numerically controlled trimming machines. Ray primarily serves the medical and instrumentation industries with secondary operations including complete assembly, and employs 55.
DuPont Co. expanding in homopolymers
WILMINGTON, DEL. - DuPont Co. of Wilmington is investing nearly $25 million to expand its global production capacity for homopolymer fluoropolymer resins during the next two years.
DuPont said it plans to debottleneck plants in Parkersburg, W.Va.; Shimizu, Japan; and Dordrecht, Netherlands, to increase production of granular, fine powder and dispersion homopolymer resins by 1997. The company did not reveal production capacities at its three sites.
The company said it is distributing its $25 million investment in relation to expectations for growth in the markets the sites serve. It is putting 40 percent of its $25 million investment into its U.S. site, while dividing the remainder between the Japan and Netherlands facilities.
Total worldwide capacity for all fluoropolymer producers is 110 million to 120 million pounds.
Sumitomo plans Japan's primo PP plant
TOKYO-Sumitomo Chemical Co. of Tokyo, Japan's largest producer of polypropylene, announced Oct. 20 it intends to invest nearly $70 million to build the largest single PP production facility in Japan by 1997.
Sumitomo said it is building a plant to produce 264 million pounds of PP at Chiba. The new facility will replace obsolete production equipment, the company said. It did not identify how much old capacity would be put out of production.
Sumitomo has the capacity to produce 902 million pounds of PP in Japan.
Total Plastics relocates light distributor
ELK GROVE VILLAGE, ILL. - Plastics distributor Total Plastics Inc. of Kalamazoo, Mich., has moved an acquired lighting products distribution business to its Elk Grove Village facility.
Total bought Genesta Plastic Products, a Bensenville, Ill., distributor of plastic and metal lighting lenses and diffusers for the aftermarket, last spring from Genesta Manufacturing Ltd. of Guelph, Ontario. Genesta Manufacturing will supply Total with extruded and vacuum formed retrofit lighting components it makes in Guelph, according to Graham Lobban, regional sales manager for Genesta Manufacturing. He estimated the Bensenville operation's sales at C$1 million (US$720,000) annually.
Lobban said his firm set up the Bensenville distribution business for the U.S. market five years ago but decided to focus on manufacturing and directly supplying lighting products to original equipment manufacturers. It supplies U.S. OEMs from Chicago.
Genesta Manufacturing is owned by Pavaco Plastics Inc., a private firm in Guelph. Pavaco also owns Hematite Manufacturing, a Guelph-based extruder and vacuum former of automotive acoustic products that sells directly to automotive OEMs.
Polycom Huntsman opening 8th facility
WASHINGTON, PA. - Polycom Huntsman Inc., a Washington-based compounder, will open its eighth compounding facility, in Lake Charles, La., late next year.
The facility, which is being developed on a greenfield site near the Port of Lake Charles, will have about 50 million pounds of material capacity per year and will employ about 40, according to George Abd, vice president, sales and marketing.
``It will be a little bit different from our other plants,'' Abd said. ``It will be of a modular design, with separate small buildings for the individual production lines, and a central area for the offices. The final designs are not in yet, but it will be about 40,000-50,000 square feet.''
The facility will compound color and additive concentrates and filled polypropylene. The company also will be adding filled PP production at its Oxnard, Calif., plant in January. Polycom took over operations at the Oxnard site from GE Plastics Inc. in September, and is producing GE's Cycolac ABS, Lexan polycarbonate and Geloy weatherable polymers.
The company has two plants in Donora, Pa., and one each in Conneaut, Ohio; Lockport, N.Y.; St. Clair, Mich.; Oxnard; and Donchery, France.
