Hall of Fame: Hunerberg pushed structural foam to new heights

TECUMSEH, MICH. — A big fish in a little pond. The Big Kahuna of the tiny niche of structural foam machinery. A world traveler for plastics. That's Ed Hunerberg.

Summing up his 44-year career, Hunerberg laughed and said: “It's like spreading the gospel of structural foam around the world. A structural foam disciple. Not too many people were doing it, you know?”

Hunerberg, Uniloy Milacron's vice president of structural foam, is credited with major innovations that have improved the process, such as sequential injection and independent nozzle control. He said all the improvements were made to help solve specific molding problems for customers — then ended up benefiting the entire industry.

As he enters the Plastics Hall of Fame, Hunerberg said it's a credit to the small, close-knit industry.

“It helps to elevate the industry, and it's representative of my customers and my colleagues in the industry. You don't do it all by yourself,” he said.

Hunerberg, 69, has more than four decades of funny stories. He's sold and installed machines in Israel, Turkey, Brazil, China — anywhere they need big collapsible boxes for agriculture, or pallets, or water tanks.

That Christmas party and safari in South Africa in 2001, when the first structural press went into South Africa. A sales call in China during a typhoon. A vodka-fueled boat ride on the Kama River of Russia to celebrate the first machines sold in that country. A lunch buffet at a Sizzler Restaurant in Indianapolis to discuss a landmark eight-press order for the Dogloo doghouse shaped like an igloo.

Yes, Hunerberg is a guru. He helped structural foam move from a fairly primitive process to the glory days of computer housings, to today's world of big parts. He's a lively guy who tells funny stories about the characters of his industry, in a slight New York accent mellowed by years spent living in small-town Michigan. But he can get serious, too: “It's a small little fraternity of people, which I like about it. If it was really big I wouldn't be as enthusiastic about it.”

To the casual observer, the low-pressure structural foam process seems like wizardry. Nitrogen gas is dissolved into thermoplastic resin in an extruder barrel, which feeds the melt into an accumulator. A ram sends a short-shot into the mold, and the foam expands to fill out the part. The big platens are filled with holes, so you can mount several smaller molds, or make one huge part. Nozzles go into the holes in any arrangement you want.

Rocket Boys

Growing up on Long Island, Hunerberg was always interested in science and electronics.

“I would read science fiction comics, books, magazines,” he said. He was 12 when the Soviets launched Sputnik.

The book, “Rocket Boys,” described a teenage rocket club in the ‘50s in West Virginia. Hunerberg and his friends formed one in the middle of the big city.

“One summer we were bored. I said ‘let's build some rockets.' And in those days, you could go down to the drugstore, and you could buy potassium nitrate and sulfur and charcoal. Just go in and buy it. I had a newspaper route. So I had the money and I had two friends. We got a book on explosives and rockets,” he said.

He sent away for a book on how to build rockets. Mixed up the gunpowder.

“We didn't know what we were doing, so we got some of those aluminum cigar tubes. We'd make our own little rocket fuel and we've go out in a field, which was like, apartment buildings all the way around it,” he recalled. “And then we'd light it off. And they would just explode right on the launchpad. It was a big bomb, basically. We'd run away so we didn't get caught.” He chortled like a preteen.

A rocket engine is really a controlled explosion, directed through a nozzle. Hunerberg saved up more money and bought a kit for an entire rocket, from a magazine ad.

“This big box comes to the house from railway express, it's marked ‘Danger, Explosives,'” he said. Somehow his mother didn't see it, so he hid it in the basement.

“While my mother was watching TV, my little brother and I were in my room mixing up rocket fuel, with a mortar and pestle. We could've blown the whole place up! So we made our first rocket engine and it was pretty big. We couldn't wait to shoot it off. So we went back to that field — it was the only open lot that was in the area. So we put it on the launch pad. We lit it off, me and my friends in the rocket club. That sucker just roared into the sky. It took off. It just disappeared.”

His high school offered electronics. Each student had a radio or a television set and worked to fix it. Hunerberg wanted to be a TV repairman.

“I'll tell you, I fall back more on what I learned in vocational electronics in high school than I learned, even in college,” he said. “My troubleshooting background. My thought processes.”

In 1968, Hunerberg graduated with an electrical engineering degree from New York Institute of Technology on Long Island. The Vietnam War was on. He got a college draft deferment but the draft board called as he prepared to graduate.

“They sent me for my pre-physical. … I didn't want to be running through the jungles of Vietnam, which was a terrible war. So I went to the Air Force and I signed up for the officer candidate school.” He got in.

In the meantime, defense contractors were recruiting at NYIT. Pratt & Whitney hired him as an instrumentation engineer for testing jet engines. The job came with an occupational deferment. Some of Hunerberg's friends got killed in Vietnam.

“So I was really lucky I got the job,” he said.

In 1971, as the war was winding down, defense contracts got cut. Hunerberg's jet engine job was gone — but his structural foam career was about to begin.

Help wanted

“I see this little ad in the Springfield Republican newspaper,” Hunerberg said. “Just a little one-liner: Need degreed electrical engineer to design controls for new plastics machinery. I said, ‘What the hell's a plastics machine?' But I needed a job so I went up there to interview with them.”

The job was at Koehring Corp.'s Springfield Cast Products Division. Management was designing a concept structural foam machine. In the 1960s, Dick Angel of Union Carbide Corp. developed the basic process. Carbide licensed the technology to early foam press builders. (Later, Hunerberg said, the machinery builders got together and invalidated the patent.)

Hunerberg got in on the proverbial ground floor in Springfield, Mass. The Springfield machines used Prodex extruders from HPM, a sister company under Koehring. The machines were more an extruder than an injection molding press, and Hunerberg knew nothing about extrusion. HPM's George Kruder was his mentor. Bill Flickinger helped him learn hydraulics.

Hunerberg understood the analog relay controls of the day. But that's about it.

“I had to ask everybody how does this work? How does that work? I had to learn a lot about the entire process,” he said. “So de facto, I started becoming the process expert. So then that leads to making developmental improvements.”

As he helped create the Springfield brand, now owned Hoover Ball and Bearing Co., his boss the chief engineer left to join a competitor. Hunerberg turned down an offer to move, too, to remain at Springfield.

The company was looking to HPM for a replacement. Hunerberg was running the engineering department in an interim basis.

“Then all of a sudden it dawns on them, because they were interviewing guys right and left, hey why don't we just give it to Ed?” Suddenly, he was in charge.

Then came another wrinkle. Hoover announced during the recession of 1981 that they were closing the factory in Springfield and moving it in with its Uniloy operations in Michigan. Two hundred people got laid off. But they kept Hunerberg, he knew the technology. He selected half a dozen coworkers to move to Michigan. He relocated his family.

“So once again, the hand of fate was coming and plucked me back out,” he said.

Hoover had merged with Johnson Controls Inc. Hunerberg was chief engineer for all of Uniloy. Profitability wasn't too good, so they brought in a new CEO, who cleaned house. He fired Uniloy's president and chief engineer. They promoted Hunerberg to chief engineer.

“I knew zero about blow molding, just like I knew zero about structural foam before that,” he said. “So from 1982 to 1992 I was the engineering director for Uniloy. All the product lines, the molds and the product design.”

Structural foam takes off

Then came the revolution.

Through the 1970s, Hunerberg said, structural foam was all commodity resins like polyethylene and polypropylene. Highway crash barriers. Big, basic parts.

The computer age hit in the 1980s. Hunerberg tells the story: “What happened was, companies like GE and Bayer, looked at structural foam and said — hey wait a minute. This is a way to sell high-priced resin. Computers are just coming out now. We're going to make all the computers out of structural foam. So they just saw megabucks, right?”

The Society of the Plastics Industry Inc.'s Structural Plastics Division. That was where the action was.

“All of a sudden the Structural Plastics Division just grew like leaps and bounds, because they were pumping money into it,” he said. “We'd have 800 people show up to the structural plastics conference. They were giving out Walkmans. Everybody got a Walkman when they came in! Huge receptions. They had money coming out of their …. Well it was a big deal in those days. They had laser light shows, I mean this was huge!”

One audacious time was in Boston: “They had guys dressed up in slickers opening up oysters. They had crab legs. They had rented a big hotel ballroom. They had palm trees in the street with lights on them. I mean, everybody came to this thing. And then they had a showcase — here's some parts made out of Lexan. And the lights were shining down. Spotlights. It was a huge ballroom. Unbelievable.”

Hunerberg dug out his cassette tape that was loaded in the giveaway Walkmans: “Foam is Believing.” Six pop songs set to foam lyrics.

“This was the total glory days. But let me tell you, it totally threw the structural foam industry off track,” he said. That's because the industry moved away from commodity resins, its strong point. The computer industry started preaching thin-walling, so the housings went to injection molding. Then it all went to China.

What brought it back? Material handling, things like pallets and shipping boxes.

“We sold two machines in 1993. And 18 machines in 1994. We put together a structural foam execution team. And our little team of six or seven people won the Johnson Controls Chairman's Award for Customer Satisfaction, in 1994,” he said.

Rubbermaid Commercial Products, already a major customer, invested heavily in the structural web process to get a smooth surface finish. Then came Infiltrator's big drainage systems for under parking lots. And collapsible shipping containers took off.

For the customer

Milacron LLC bought JCI's Uniloy business in 1998. Dave Skala, group vice president at Uniloy Milacron, nominated Hunerberg to the Plastics Hall of Fame. Nine industry leaders wrote letters of support, from foam molders including DeKalb Molded Plastics Co., 20/20 Custom Molded Plastics Ltd., Cambro Manufacturing Co. Inc. and CBIS/Korfil.

By listening to customers, Hunerberg developed key design improvements. With each one, he gained more confidence: “I can find a solution if I know somebody has a problem,” he said.

In the 1970s, a customer told Hunerberg they wanted to make three window shutters of different sizes, all on one machine. But they would have required a giant foam machine, with 750 tons of clamping force. The answer: Sequential molding. The shooting pot fills up, but the nozzles open up to inject plastic for one part at a time. The customer could use a 300-ton press.

Sequential injection became the standard.

About a decade ago, Uniloy Milacron took it one step further by introducing independent nozzle control. Hunerberg explains that, even with sequential injection, you still had to crank in the flow setting on each nozzle, to balance it the system. Independent nozzles solved that.

“Every nozzle — as many as 32 and in some machines, 48 — has their own individual hydraulic valve, controlled by the computer,” he said.

You just touch a point on the control screen and change the flow. The system remembers the setting for each mold.

Other innovations include the modular manifold with multiple nozzles, a gas valve allowing intermittent extrusion, and two-color molding.

A highlight came in 2008, when Hunerberg won the Neil Armstrong Award from Milacron. Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, served on Milacron's board of directors for 20 years.

Hunerberg also is proud of a best-paper award he earned at a Structural Plastics Conference in 1991. As an engineer, he never liked to give speeches, so that was a big personal morale booster.

Structural molders keep you on your toes, he said. You pick up customers by word-of-mouth.

“It's a small industry. But on the other hand if you don't do a good job — if you don't take care of your customers in this industry — the word gets around like lightening. And you can lose all your customers in no time at all,” he said.

Check out a video profile of Hunerberg: