Davis-Standard LLC showed a lot of extruders at K 2007 - including the Euro Blue II and a small, direct-drive HPE-100A whipping out around 2,500 cotton-swab sticks a minute - but Davis-Standard also made news for a product not made of iron.
The company introduced its Davis-Standard Secure Service Support System, or DS-5, to give customers service 24/7 via a secure, high-speed Internet connection. Davis-Standard service people can get immediate access to equipment, so they can diagnose and fix problems.
``We wanted to come up with a way to eliminate unnecessary downtime for our customers, while giving our customer service personnel and engineers a faster way to solve equipment issues,'' said Tarek Adly, product manager for drives and controls.
Davis-Standard President Charles Buckley compares DS-5 to those three-month trials for XM radio that come with a new car.
``We give it to you for a year for free,'' Buckley said at the Dusseldorf show, held Oct. 24-31. Davis-Standard customers also get 25 free hours of online service.
``That's important,'' he said. ``People in China or India, they can call up at 12 o'clock their time and get somebody that can help them get their system up.''
During K 2007, Davis-Standard shuttled people to its plant in nearby Erkrath, Germany, to see an operating aseptic packaging line and other equipment. Davis-Standard is a major supplier of equipment for making aseptic packaging used for drink boxes.
Buckley acknowledged that Pawcatuck, Conn.-based Davis-Standard is not well-known for those applications in its home market. ``Customers don't demand aseptic packaging lines in the U.S., because we have all kinds of refrigerated trucks and everyone has big iceboxes in the house. But when you go to India and China, you don't have that. And so what you do is, store milk for two months without having any refrigeration,'' he said.
In other news, the Euro Blue II debuted at K, where Davis-Standard showed an extruder with a 75-millimeter screw diameter. The line of single-screw extruders comes in 50, 60, 75 and 90mm sizes. The length-to-diameter ratio is 24-to-1. The extruders are designed to run custom profile and tubing.
For the cotton-swab stick production line, the HPE-100A features direct drive instead of belts. The line is capable of slamming out 4,500 sticks per minute.