Hall of Fame: DeLong spent a career solving blow molding problems

KINGWOOD, TEXAS — Robert DeLong has combined mechanical know-how, a chemical engineer's understanding of polymers and hands-on customer skills tinkering with blow molding machines in his 58-year-career — one that is still going strong.

DeLong, 80, runs Blasformen Consulting in Kingwood.

“I've been in practically every blow molding plant in the country,” he said.

He took a few detours, studying law for a year and working in an explosives plant. But other than that, it's been all blow molding. More recently, he has teamed with David Calderone to develop the curriculum and teach blow molding at Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Ala. The course is organized by the Society of Plastics Engineers' Blow Molding Division. DeLong has been an SPE member for 57 years.

Now DeLong is going into the Plastics Hall of Fame, recognizing his innovations in blow molding resin and machinery. He said his father was a pioneer in plastics back in the 1920s — but cautioned him about the industry.

In 1928, his father, Dean DeLong, left a good-paying job at Rochester Gas and Electric to join a startup company molding buttons out of casein. Rochester, N.Y., was a hotbed of the men's clothing industry. He jumped on the ground-floor opportunity. Then the Great Depression hit. The button company closed. DeLong recalls: “He gave the keys to the house back to the bank. He'd gone through his savings. He tried to find a job in Rochester, but there was just no employment.”

So when DeLong told his father he wanted to get into plastics, it wasn't exactly a scene from “The Graduate.”

“He said, ‘I haven't had a very good experience with this. You sure you want to do this, son?'”

It worked out. DeLong held key positions at a string of seven companies. In resin, he was at Hercules Powder Co., Spencer Chemical Co., Celanese Corp. and BASF.  In blow molding machinery, DeLong was at Rainville Co. He worked at blow molders Owens-Illinois Inc. and Captive Plastics Inc.

Unrecognized patents

He was nominated for the Plastics Hall of Fame by Don Peters, a Plastics Hall of Famer who worked in blow molding at Phillips Petroleum Co. (now Chevron Phillips Chemical Co.). Peters, who is retired, said he ran into DeLong's work throughout his own career.

“He had significant technical achievements, many well-camouflaged because most of the companies for which he worked did not patent or publish technical information for fear of disclosure to competitors,” Peters wrote.

DeLong has zero patents, since much of his work was done under strict confidentiality. For a man with no patents, it's ironic that DeLong later studied law. He thought about being a patent attorney.

“I had one year of law school and I said, no, I don't think that's for me,” he recalled.

DeLong has always been mechanically inclined, rebuilding cars and restoring motorcycles. He was going to be a machinist, but decided on engineering and won scholarships to Clarkson University in upstate New York, based on financial need.

“So essentially, between working at A&P stocking shelves and my scholarships, my college didn't cost my dad anything,” he said.

At Clarkson, he picked chemical engineering because of its job opportunities and salary potential.

DeLong earned his chemical engineering degree in 1956, then went to work at the Hercules research center in Wilmington, Del., at first in polypropylene, which was just emerging.

“We'd get 75, 80 pounds from the pilot plant. And it stunk, it was yellow. But it was a new polymer, and we were looking at, where could we make this work? That's how I got into blow molding, because there was no impact at low temperature in homopolymer polypropylene. That's all we knew how to make at the time,” he said.

Hercules had an extensive rubber laboratory, and made rosin tackifiers.

“So we alloyed polypropylene homopolymer, with rubber, to give it low-temperature impact. And to test that we actually blew bottles.” he said. “I had a little hand-operated Plax blow molder. I had a homemade drop impact tester. And we'd fill the bottle with ice water and condition it for X number of minutes, and then drop it. And see how much feet of impact it could take.”

Because of his polypropylene work, Hercules moved DeLong over to its explosives division. His assignment: develop a PP/polyethylene blend for coating dynamite wire. Later he moved on to explosive devices themselves.

Jug breakthrough

He left in 1959 and went to Spencer Chemical, where he created a replacement for wax coatings on Ex-Cell-O milk cartons: linear low density PE.

Many of his major blow molding materials advancements came at Celanese from 1963 to 1970. HDPE milk jugs were just coming out. Then, as now, Uniloy reciprocating screw blow molding machines dominated in milk jugs. DeLong understood that Uniloy machines required specific requirements for melt rheology.

The parison has to have enough flare, or diameter increase, as it comes down to get past the point of the handle. Too little flare and it won't seal. Too much and it flashes.

Also important is the rate of swell — how thick the parison gets.

“You stretch the molecules and they want to come back. So you get an elastic response,” he said. “You have to catch the handle. And there's no laboratory test to predict it.”

DeLong said the Uniloy blow molding machines had very few adjustments, since they made the same thing all day and were run by dairy people, not plastics experts. Variations in the resin could cause problems. DeLong supervised the development of Celanese's milk bottle resin, commercialized as A60-70R, which held an 80 percent market share for a number of years.

He convinced Celanese's resin plant to blend and pelletize the HDPE on the same equipment for each lot. The resin maker had four compounding lines.

“Each one had a little bit different rheological input into the resin. So the product wasn't always the same, even though you started with the same flake, because it had gone through a different heat history and severity of shear,” DeLong said.

He also was the first to recognize the effect of the shear rate of parison extrusion on melt fracture, and its adverse impact on surface finish of the milk bottles. Low extrusion rates give low shear, usually resulting in surface problems.

One cause: An accumulator that's losing its nitrogen charge.

“What happens is, it calls for the shot to move forward, and it starts out initially above the melt fracture point. And then at the end of the shot, it slows down,” DeLong explained. He carried a nitrogen gauge on service calls, to check.

He also designed extrusion heads that minimized or eliminated rough surfaces from melt fracture, such as chatter marks.

Also while at Celanese DeLong designed the first offset blow pins for Uniloy machines.

“This would allow you to move the mold underneath the fixed tooling. So if you didn't have enough flare, you could move it over just a little bit. So it gave you lateral movement of the mold,” he said.

At BASF in 1970 and 1971, he was involved in developing the first gas-phase PP in the United States.

He moved to Rainville Co., Dewey Rainville's blow molding machinery company, from 1971 to 1974. DeLong said the company developed injection blow molding equipment for several firsts, including a plastic peanut butter jar and polycarbonate baby bottles.

Other materials

There was another first, but it was top secret. Rainville did tests on a mystery material from Amoco Chemical Co.

“Amoco came to us and said we have this material and we'd like you to injection blow it. They wouldn't tell us what it was. It came in a 25-gallon can that was sealed,” DeLong said.

Rainville made some crude bottle-shaped parts, he said. The Amoco people were delighted with the potential of the material … PET. DeLong said the innovation predated other patents, but Rainville was not allowed to patent it.

DeLong also participated in the first injection blow molded beer bottles, using Monsanto Co.'s acrylonitrile.

He also helped Rainville develop the concept of “bundling” — putting together a turnkey system of blow molding machine, mold and operator training, backed up by a guaranteed output level. “One Source” was the motto.

DeLong moved on again, this time to Owens-Illinois Inc. in Toledo, Ohio, where he worked from 1975 to 1980. As marketing manager, he helped form OI's first joint venture to compete in injection blow molding, working with Bekum America Corp. He developed a one-stage PET machine to produce bottles for Lavoris mouthwash, for a market evaluation.

He helped Captive Plastics set up a West Coast blow molding plant, working there from 1980 to 1986. Finally, he was a senior engineering consultant for Solvay SA until he started his own consulting business in 2006.

Don Peters of Phillips learned about DeLong as a competitor in the 1960s. They were both technical sales engineers and occasionally called on the same customers.

“Bob was a ‘doer' as well as a chemical engineer, installing innovative processing modifications that improved production efficiency in plants,” Peters wrote in his nomination. “It didn't take long to respect his work!”

Peters said that DeLong played a key role in advising blow molding companies — as a “mother hen.”

For his part, DeLong said those days of resin companies closely helping customers are long gone.

“The MBAs, the bean counters, have ruined customer service,” he said. “Because it's easy to quantify how much money you spend on customer assistance. But it's hard to recognize what kind of a payback you get from that, what kind of loyalty.”

DeLong said a customer who buys only on price, “he'll kill for half a cent a pound, and leave you.”

“Service, everybody talks about it. Everybody likes it,” he said. “It's kind of like pumping your own gas. It was kind of nice to have the guy clean the windshield and pump the gas.”

Check out a video profile of DeLong: