Hall of Fame: Lupke fought copycats in corrugator industry

CONCORD, ONTARIO — Manfred Lupke, a German immigrant to Canada, had never seen a pipe corrugator before when his new employer asked him to make one. He knew nothing.

“And that was my biggest luck,” said Lupke, an engineer with a bit of a flair who runs Corma Inc. He didn't make the mistakes he said others had made with corrugators for polyethylene and vinyl pipe and conduit.

He started Corma in 1973. That first year, he sold a perforator saw to a customer, and saw their corrugators.

“That really opened my eyes how lucky I was that I had no knowledge of these machines when I designed my corrugator,” he said.

Lupke, 75, holds 848 patents for corrugators — deceptively simple-looking devices that make the indented corrugations in everything from drainage pipe in fields and along highways, to sewer pipe down to tiny tubing conduit for fiber-optics. Corma recently built a corrugator for pipe six feet in diameter. The company has built a line for conduit with an inside diameter of just one millimeter.

Corma, which employs about 200 people in Concord, north of Toronto, has built more than 1,300 corrugators sold around the world. The company also makes saws, perforators and dies — everything downstream from the extruder. Corma runs a foundry in Sarnia, Ontario, to control its own castings.

The company has gained a reputation of aggressively protecting his patents by going to court around the world. And Lupke is a major force in the narrow but important niche of the plastics industry. Corrugation makes stiff pipe with less weight. It can be flexible, to go around corners, such as electrical conduit in a wall.

Lupke was named Leader of the Year by the Canadian Plastics Industry Association in 2007. Three years ago, he was awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Now Lupke is getting more recognition as a new member of the Plastics Hall of Fame. Corma also is exhibiting at NPE 2015, in Booth W2431.

Life in Germany

Luck played a role in Lupke's childhood. He was born near Frankfurt Oder, a town in eastern Germany along the Oder River. As World War II wound down, 6-year-old Manfred, his mother, grandmother and aunt, became refugees, moving west. Retreating German soldiers blew up the bridge that connected Frankfurt to what is now Poland.

The young boy witnessed a violent history.

“One thing that I will remember is, we were in the track in between the horse-drawn cart. And fighter planes came. And they had under the wing the German national emblem, the swastika. And then they turned and showed on top of the wings, it was a Russian emblem. And they were just shooting in between people, and there were dead animals and dead people,” he said.

The family members survived and kept heading west to Berlin. His grandfather was a captain for a river barge company.

“Then we were lucky that my grandfather was there. And we got on this barge and it was towed up to Hamburg,” he said.

The family lived in the barge docked at Hamburg. More wartime memories for the boy: the bombing of Hamburg. “We were in a bunker for three days. And then we came out and we could see from those bridges to the main railroad station. And this is like 5 kilometers. Everything was all flat.”

They remained on the boat even when the war ended. His father, who served in the German army, was released from a prisoner camp and reunited with his family, and they lived in Essen.

Lupke met a cute girl in second grade, named Renate — and they got married in 1962.

“She remembers exactly what I was wearing when we met!” Lupke said, laughing.

His parents, along with his brother and sister, immigrated to Canada around in the mid-1960s. Manfred and Renate Lupke followed in 1969.

Unique design

He took a job as a maintenance worker at a company that made steel buildings. One day, a friend, another German immigrant, suggested that he call his brother-in-law, who had a company called Experimental Tool. The business needed someone who could design and build machinery.

Lupke had enjoyed mechanical work since he played with construction toys as a child back in Germany.

“So I made a phone call. I had my interview, and they showed me a piece of four-inch drainage tubing that had slits in it where the water can penetrate out. And asked if I could build them a machine,” he said.

It was to corrugate polyethylene pipe. Lupke knew nothing about plastics and had never even seen an extruder.

“They asked me if I could design and build a machine for that pipe. And I said yes. I was confident I could figure it out. I got the job and I designed the machine,” he said.

Plastic pipe was pretty new. But other companies, particularly in Germany, made corrugators to make electrical conduit. Lupke had no idea, so he started from scratch and designed a unique machine.

His boss liked it. Lupke started building, and he was almost finished when he came to the central challenge: How to make the mold blocks release the pipe cleanly, without damaging the corrugation in the pipe?

“And then I had a few sleepless nights. Then one night I woke up my wife and said ‘I have my answer.' It came to me in my dreams. It helped me to separate the mold, parallel so I could release the corrugation from the mold,” he said.

After that viola moment, he built the corrugators for Experimental Tool for about two-and-a-half years. The boss lost interest in the project at the Arab Oil Embargo hit, limiting the availability of plastic resin.

So he teamed with his wife and a colleague and founded Corma. It was pretty basic.

“We had a flame cutter that would cut through the steel” to make the mold blocks, he said. Experimental Tool supplied a chain that linked the mold blocks together, a method Corma soon replaced  with a track on which the blocks ride.

“We have always done a lot of development. Because as an engineer you always like to do the next machine better than the first one, Lupke said. He applied for five new patents last year.

Manfred Lupke's son, Stefan Lupke, who is Corma's executive vice president, nominated him for the Plastics Hall of Fame.

Intellectual property

Lupke described a few important patents. They are fundamental. For example, a vacuum forming system for corrugated pipe. Early on, the pipe was pushed into the corrugation using a blow molding process. Lupke added vacuum, through small slits around the outside of the block, boosting production.

Another breakthrough patent: Corma's Super Cooling design. Hot plastic tends to shrink away from the mold, causing it to lose contact with the block and lose cooling. Corma also uses cold air on both the mold block and inside the pipe, using the vacuum slits.

Other patents include double layer in-line coupling, a mold block quick return system, and a compact die for corrugating large-diameter pipe.

A discussion of Corma's many patents leads to the issue of protecting intellectual property. It's a big topic for Lupke, and he has a lot to say.

He believes in getting patents in many countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom and China. Corma started getting those patents in the 1980s and 1990s. The company has won some high-profile patent-infringement lawsuits against Chinese competitors, in courts in China and the United States. In 2010, Chinese courts ordered Shanghai Jwell Machinery Co. Ltd., to pay 750,000 yuan ($112,000), while a U.S. court ordered Jwell to pay $750,000.

Corma opened a factory in Shanghai in 2005, to build small corrugators and provide low-cost components to the Canadian plant. His law firm is in Shanghai, too.

Intellectual property theft from China is a huge issue. But Lupke said it is possible to defend patents there.

“I have experience all over the world. But so far I have never had a bad experience in China. I've never lost a case in China,” he said.

Lupke said German courts can be tough, as judges and lawyers there can out up roadblocks to discourage patent cases. He said western governments need to take an interest in the issue and speak out strongly.

Lupke said he always has been outspoken.

“I believe very much in that one should be honest,” he said. “My parents, when I was a young boy, were always telling me I should be more diplomatic. And in my vocabulary at that time, and to some extent still is, is that diplomatic is not the same word as honesty. So this is my very nature.”

Sometimes protecting patents can get rough and tumble.

As another NPE begins, Lupke recounted a story:

“We had a situation that one of the Chinese [companies], they copied one of our corrugators. We had an injunction against this company. This was during the time of an NPE show in Chicago. We noticed that they had this product they were still promoting this at the Chicago show.

“And so one of our lawyers from Chicago went to the stand of this Chinese firm at NPE and he said to them, ‘There is an injunction, you are not allowed to do that.'

“Right away, three or four Chinese put him down on the ground.  My secretary at this time, a lady, she was a little bit of a ringer. She pulled them off of him!”

Check out a video profile of Lupke.