Düsseldorf, Germany — Lüdenscheid, Germany-headquartered mold components producer Hasco Hasenclever GmbH + Co. KG featured its new web portal at K 2016 in Düsseldorf, which was launched on April 18 and has had 6,000 new registrations.
Dirk Paulmann, executive vice president, sales and business development, described Hasco as a “very innovative and agile company.” The web portal is an example of this, and he called it “the Amazon shop for mold parts — just type in anything and you will get to it.”
There have been 270,000 web sessions since it was launched and average user time has doubled from three to six minutes, contributing to 6,000 orders placed and executed via the portal.
It is all part of the Hasco tradition of innovation, Paulmann said. He maintains that Hasco offers “the easiest way to build molds.”
Despite the large number of items produced and stocked by Hasco and available via the new portal, Paulmann said Hasco has “simplicity as our mission, which means standardizing mold making in order to maximize productivity, but also quality and innovation.”
For example, order processes have been simplified in many cases by packing guide, bearing and ejector product assemblies in groups of five. The PDM system includes 3-D models, as well as product features, logic connections and dependencies, and it also serves as a technical database for digital customer tools.
A new 80-page Hasco mold specification builder prepares specifications for end users, “secures mold quality in a simple way” and comes with secure mold vendor communication. Paulmann said: “Many specifications are just too old, yet toolmakers are so busy that no one has time create specifications.” The specification builder should provide some alleviation here, Paulmann believes.
He summarized this as one of the latest “Hasco 4.0” developments at Hasco in the past year, not only in products, but also production at processes at the Lüdenscheid plant and all aimed “at making our customers more successful.” Speed of quotations have steadily increased since January 2016, and inventory values have doubled in the past two years. More than 99 percent of components and standard mold plates are now available from stock, and the figure across all product lines is above 95 percent. Paulmann said this shows how Hasco is “a full-service provider; there are not many left today.”
Hasco has introduced free-of-charge delivery to customers in the European Union, Switzerland and Turkey, who now pay just a nominal service charge. With the likely exit of the United Kingdom from the EU, Paulmann assured British customers that they continue getting free-of-charge deliveries.
Among new products introduced in the past 12 months is a P1 mold plate in stress-relieved steel, involving two annealing stages. The plate is machined on all sides, and Hasco says the P1 has “perfect surface quality and parallelism.”
Paulmann referred to roughness values of Rz 25 and Rz 10 on respective side and top surfaces, and 0.02 mm tolerance in terms of parallelism. The fine-tuned machining of the new P1 plates allows Hasco customers to reduce their grinding effort. P1 plates are available in 12 steel types, also including Hasco M and Toolex 33 steels. P1 plate availability increased from just under 91 percent in mid-July to 97 percent today.
Aside from P1 plates, more than 600 new items have been added to Hasco's product range, especially in larger-sized components. This has involved items such as guides, ejectors, sealing components, cooling products and support pillars.
Investment in the Lüdenscheid plant in the past year has involved extension of Hasco's automated guided vehicle (AGV) system, with which laser-controlled fork-lift trucks move safely and securely around the plant under control of SAP software, accessing production items that are kept and reordered using a kanban system.
Milling capacity and the number of staff and machines in Lüdenscheid have increased and grinding department optimization has raised capacity there. The Hasco shop floor management now has “lean projects” and uses a 5S total quality management (TQM) system. 5S was developed in Japan as a technique enabling just-in-time production. It defines principles for efficient and effective workplaces, identifying and storing items, as well as maintaining plant cleanliness and order.
In a presentation of new parts, Andre Brandt, executive vice president mold base technology, talked about a new A8500 Clever Mold System providing efficient and variable clamping, as standard components of a conventional injection molding tool are integrated in the A8500's clamping device. Clever Mold includes a K3600 small series tool that can be changed in 10.5 minutes, compared with around 30 minutes for a conventional medium-sized mold. This cuts typical mold-change cost by 28 euros, to 40 euros, assuming machine and staff each cost 40 euros per hour.
Brandt also referred to the Cool Cross project, which has compared mold inserts made by inkjet 3-D printing VeroClear acrylic-like plastic from Stratasys Ltd. (Hall 4/C55) on a Stratasys Connex 500 printer, 3-D selective laser sintered (SLS) 1.2709 steel powder made on Concept Laser GmbH's M3 equipment and conventional HSC high-speed milled steel. Hasco concluded all three material solutions have advantages and disadvantages. SLS inserts are most expensive, but offer highest molding efficiency potential when such incorporating close contour cooling channels.
Florian Larisch, executive vice president hot runners, focused on a new Vario Shot hot runner nozzle “as one nozzle with 1,000 possibilities,” an advance on the earlier Techni Shot nozzle design, yet with a similar layout. The new nozzle features press-fitted heaters for high and even heat transfer, insulating material use to minimize exterior heat loss, larger melt channels within a more compact architecture, with very narrow pitches possible in multidrop applications.
The wear-resistant molybdenum tips can be easily changed and optionally given an additional wear resistant coating for processing highly abrasive materials. Heaters can be replaced without nozzle disassembly. Hasco claims flow-optimized torpedo geometry and reduced shear stress from larger melt channels and just minimally reduced torpedo cross-section.