Maguire dreams up solutions to mechanical problems

Aston, Pa. — Stephen Maguire thinks in pictures, from taking a clock apart as a child to the Maguire Weigh Scale Blender, which burst onto the scene in 1989 and surpassed the 50,000-unit mark two years ago.

"As a kid, I always invented things. It wasn't like I was inventing anything that would work," said with a wry chuckle. "But I was dreaming up solutions to mechanical puzzles ever since as early as I can remember. Silly little things I would sketch. I like to call it 'mechanical puzzles.' So I just always liked to do that."

Maguire, 74, is headed into the Plastics Hall of Fame. A prolific inventor, he can seem a bit shy and soft-spoken when you first meet him. But his unique way of thinking about machinery has benefited his family-owned auxiliary equipment company, Maguire Products Inc. in Aston, a suburb of Philadelphia.

It's also benefited the overall plastics industry, said Frank Kavanagh, Maguire Products' vice president of sales, who nominated him for the Plastics Hall of Fame.

"Steve Maguire has a passion for solving problems, and his 41 patents on auxiliary equipment are a direct result of that passion," Kavanagh said. "I think it's safe to say that he would've done that on any industry that he worked with. And in the plastics industry, I think we're fortunate to be the beneficiaries of his career choice. I know I am."

Maguire is a hands-on owner who dreams up the new equipment.

Maguire Products transformed material handling technology — first developing a new feeder and then a reasonably-priced gravimetric blender that came out in 1989.

Volumetric blenders were in wide use then. Gravimetric feeders were available but were too expensive for most injection molders, he said.

"They were completely different. Gravimetric was big machines. They'd sit in the corner and they'd be 6 by 6 feet, 8 feet high, four hoppers, augers feeding a central thing. Load cells on all the hoppers. DC drives. Augers. Everything here I'm mentioning is expensive. And so, when you're done, it's $30,000 or $50,000," Maguire said.

The Maguire Weigh Scale Blender was $7,000. Sales took off, and now Maguire blenders have become a widely used standard in the industry. Today, even as Maguire has diversified, the blender accounts for about half of Maguire Products' annual sales of about $35 million, he said.

The idea for the Maguire blender came in a feeder ​ he developed years before.

But to understand Steve Maguire, you have to go back to his childhood. He has dyslexia. Back when he was in school, that condition was not diagnosed like it is today. He was slow in reading. He sometimes wrote letters and words backwards.

Maguire repeated second grade.

"Then the fourth-grade teacher actually took me from the slowest reading group in her class. I remember her moving me into the middle group, and I was like 'Wow, I'm in the middle group of reading!" he said.

But he was good at math and could remember details about subjects he read of particular interest. Even today, he prefers trade magazines and technical articles instead of, say, fiction.

Then there are those mechanical puzzles — a key to Maguire's inventive prowess.

"It seems like people who are dyslexic have this other kind of brain, which is a visual brain, very good at visualizing," he said. "I can visualize things beyond what I have ever met anyone else can do. I can sit at home lying with my eyes closed and design almost that entire weigh-scale blender. I mean, including dimensions. Because I can keep track of it in a picture form. and then I just go and write it all down."

Today, he's writing it down in a CAD file. "In fact, that's what I do today. I design something and then I go to an engineer who's good on the computer and I tell him what to put in the computer. I just give him the dimensions," Maguire said.

He was always ambitious. In Maguire's senior year of high school, he ran a grass-cutting business, lining up 70 customers and two trucks. He hired his friends, passing out assignments at lockers between classes. He netted $3,000 and bought a used Mercedes.

(Today, he has a collection of 17 cars, including many models from his youth.)

After high school, he bounced around many jobs. He tried college at Drexel University, thinking about civil engineering, but didn't it last long.

"Honest to God, the first year it was just a review of math. It's all overrated, what they teach you in college. Especially the first year," he said.

Maguire backed into plastics. His father-in-law ran a small extrusion company, and Maguire worked for an injection molder, ATZ Plastics. At ATZ, his boss announced the company got an order from Sears to mold shower curtain hooks in 18 colors. They wanted to try liquid color, then a new thing in the 1970s.

Maguire telephoned Inmont and got information on two types of pumps it made: a piston pump and a diaphragm pump.

"In both cases, if you changed colors, you had to take it all apart. So, I thought, they should use a peristaltic pump, which you can buy. So, I bought one," he said.

A peristaltic pump moves fluids using a flexible tube inside a circular pump housing. As a rotor turns, lobes on the rotor pinch-close the tube, forcing the fluid forward. The tubing has to get squeezed totally flat and come back to its round shape, over and over and over.

The pump came with vinyl tubing, but Maguire discovered liquid color would attack vinyl. Maguire got in touch with a tubing extruder, New Age Industries, just two doors down in Southampton, Pa. He walked over. They gave him a free piece of polyurethane tubing to try out.

"I put it in the pump, and it ultimately lasted six months. By the time it lasted 30 days, I thought, I know something. I now know something that nobody else knows," he said.

He started working at home on the liquid color pump. He bought 5,000 feet of the PUR tubing.

He started Maguire Products in 1977 in his apartment in Willow Grove, Pa., outside of Philadelphia, building the liquid color pumps. He was 34. When it looked like the business was going to take off, he contacted his ex-wife, who had stayed in their house. They switched places: He moved into the house, and she went to the apartment. Their three young sons stayed in the house.

All three sons work with their father today. Stephen runs overall production, Eric is in operations, and Paul is president and CEO of liquid color producer Riverdale Global, an affiliated company.

Maguire developed the liquid color pump working out of his attic. Then he moved through a series of rented buildings, before moving to a much bigger plant in Media, Pa., in 1985. The company expanded into an industrial park in Aston, where Maguire Products now occupies six buildings, for a total of 250,000 square feet of manufacturing space. The original plant in Media does metal fabrication.

The company has about 100 employees: one person for each 2,500 square feet. They assemble machines from components mostly supplied by outside shops. Maguire believes in keeping lots of inventory, ordering, say 100 hoppers at a time to get a lower unit price. The parts are placed right by the assembly area. Finished goods are kept on the factory floor for shipment, not moved to a separate warehouse. It takes up a lot of space — one reason for the spread-out workspaces — but Maguire said it's efficient and works well. Machinery is ready to be shipped out right away.

Employees can make 10 or 20 pieces of machinery at a time, laying out the parts in order and methodically putting them together.

"And everything is visual," he explained. "They can see if the inventory's dropping, the people that make the stuff. And they can also see if we're running out of parts because the parts are right next to them. When the parts get low, they order more parts. It's all visual. No computers."

In an interview at his company's headquarters in Aston, Maguire ended up explaining a lot about how he thinks about problems.

"Now, it can't be too complicated or I have to sort of spill out what I've thought of and then work on that and spill out the next. It's not like it's crystal clear in my head. But that ability to visualize goes along with this other — you know, one side of the brain is visual and one side's verbal. My verbal side is weak, I would say. Although, I'm certainly talking a lot right now. But some people can talk forever, just rattle off doo-doo-doo-doo. But I'm not that way."

Maguire likes to sit quietly and work things out in his head.

"I like to look at the problem with absolutely no preconceived notion as to how that problem should be solved. And I think about solutions to that problem. And I generally think about many solutions. I think about one, and I work it all out. Then I think about another. I go back, well maybe there's a better way. Then I think about another solution and another solution until I think I have thought about every way you could possibly solve this problem and I have decided one is the best. And I don't want to find out when I'm done that there was a better one that I didn't see because I settled on the first one."

And the new products flow out. In 1980, Maguire pioneered the use of microprocessors on auxiliary equipment, according to his Plastics Hall of Fame nomination document. The Weigh Scale Blender followed in 1989. Other innovations included a shuttle granulator that uses a planer to shave down large scrap parts, followed by a Maguire granulator to make regrind, the "Pump-in-a-Drum" liquid color system for Riverdale and a Gaylord Sweeper that uses a revolving device and vacuum to get every pellet out of bulk resin boxes.

The company developed a new-generation vacuum resin dryer, the VBD, in 2013 — 13 years after its first generation, the LPD. The VDB dryer uses vacuum and heating simultaneously in two separate vessels, reducing energy consumption and startup time.

Many machinery companies tend to start with a fairly complex design, then trim it down to hit a cost target. Maguire starts out with a minimalist approach.

"I design as simple as I can possibly design it, as inexpensively as I can design it," he said. "And by the way, that's the talent. Any engineer probably can solve a problem — they put a man on the moon. But try to do it at a cost that makes it a marketable product people will buy," he said.

The Maguire Weigh Scale Blender is a good example. Everyone could try one at its original $7,000 price. When it worked well, they ordered another.

But the blender concept came from Maguire's work on volumetric feeders. One problem with feeders was the user had to calibrate them, which wasn't easy. Companies would want to put in 4 percent color, but would really be putting 8 or 10 percent, he said. "I wanted to solve that problem so that the number they put on was 4, because they wanted 4 percent color."

He worked backward. "You have to weigh it, because it's different bulk densities," he said. "It might feed differently. You have to weigh the natural. If you're putting in regrind, regrind has color already in it, and you don't want to weigh the color of the regrind; you want to know how much regrind to put in…"

That got him thinking about the press-mounted blender. Instead of big augers, use slide gates to drop material onto a weigh pan. He tinkered around. "Open and close it, and then I would weigh it, and then I would very carefully put in the right amount of color," he said.

Maguire watched as the load cell got heavy, then closed the slide gate. But the accuracy wasn't there. One problem was the vibration of the injection molding machine.

"And I thought, if I just timed the gate, just use time, then it doesn't matter — the shaking, the vibration or anything else — I could time it perfectly," he recalled.

That method turned out to be very accurate.

"This was a cheap slide gate that had a $10 air cylinder and a $20 solenoid valve. And I'm more accurate than the auger feeder, which is $500 or $1,000 dollars worth of stuff. It's like, I'm done! I just had to figure out how to build it."

It took another year or so to perfect it. "But that's how they work," he said. "And slide gates, it turns out, timed precisely, are extremely accurate. And so everyone said, 'It won't work. It won't work. It won't work because of vibration.' I didn't care about vibration because I was timing it."

And the Maguire blender saves money. Ford Motor Co. put one in a molding factory, and it paid for itself in six weeks, he said.

"And that's why everyone wants them," Maguire said.

Read the Viewpoint on the Hall of Fame and find links to other profiles.