Honored for​ 'very little work'

Charlton, Mass. — Staffers at MTD Micro Molding boast that they spend every day working on projects that no other molder can make.

"A good project [for MTD] has to have some level of impossibility, or the customer is struggling with the geometry or the material or the process. And that's the perfect fit for MTD," said Gary Hulecki, executive vice president of the Charlton-based company.

T-shirts and coffee mugs boast that MTD does "very little work." That's a play on its specialty: designing parts, making tools and molding parts so small that it can make 520 from a single resin pellet. Not all parts are microsized, but all have difficult-to-mold tiny features, like a 0.002-inch hole or a 0.004-inch wall thickness.

MTD is accustomed to winning awards from Plastics News. The company has twice before been a finalist for Processor of the Year, and it won the PN Excellence Award for employee relations in 2017. The company also has twice ​ been named to PN's Best Places to Work list.

Now, the company can add something new to its list of accomplishments: 2018 Plastics News Processor of the Year.

MTD was selected as the winner prior to the unexpected death of Dennis Tully, the company's owner and president, on Feb. 28. He was 58 years old.

MTD also has two mottos: "Be the First" and "Ever Forward." Tully referenced them frequently when he talked about the 47-year-old company's resume during a Feb. 13 visit to the company. He liked to be on the cutting edge of technology, and MTD touts itself as the only molding company solely dedicated to micro and medical, with a unique specialty in bioabsorbable microinjection molding.

MTD invested in new equipment to stay on the cutting edge in 2018, adding a first-in-North-America Mitsubishi MX600 wire EDM capable of using wire smaller than 50 microns in diameter in tool building. Other new equipment included a Sarix EDM milling machine for ultraprecise part geometry and surface finish for micromolded parts, two more Sodick molding presses, gas chromatography testing equipment and a six-axis robot for a molding cell.

The company invested in new talent, too, adding Patrick Haney to a new position, R&D engineer. His specialty is investigating the unique properties of medical polymers in micromolding.

"Patrick came on board because, although we did spend time doing R&D-type projects before, we could never commit to them because the same resources that we were using for R&D had to be committed to any production projects that were coming in," Tully said.

Tully cited an example where Haney's materials expertise helped define the right material for a new application.

"And his reason for picking the materials were — when you listen to his explanation, the people that sat across the table said, 'Oh, it makes perfect sense. Nobody else has told us this.' So having that additional level of understanding materials really helps when it applies to real-world problems," Tully said.

The company was founded as Miniature Tool & Die Inc. in 1972 in the basement of Richard Tully's home — that's Dennis' father. It later moved to a small facility in Worcester and then to its current 16,000-square-foot home in Charlton, located approximately 55 miles west of Boston.

"He often said, 'You can either do something really small, that other people can't do, or really big. And it's a lot easier to do something really small because it doesn't take as much space," Tully joked.

The move to Worcester was important because it gave the company an electrical discharge machine, which was very rare technology at the time.

"I had no plan to join the company until he called me one day. It was late 1988, and I was working for another manufacturer where I was the engineering manager. And he said, 'Hey I think this might be a good time for us to talk. I want you to come on board,'" Dennis Tully recalled. "And I said, 'What will I do?' And he said, 'Well, you'll build molds.' And I said, 'I don't know anything about how to build molds.' He said, 'Well you can learn.' I was 28 years old when we had that discussion."

The company began molding small medical parts in 1988. One key project in MTD's history came in 1999, when Boston Scientific commissioned the company to build a mold for what was then the world's smallest plastic part.

"It was used to arrest a brain aneurysm. It looks almost like a rivet," Tully said. "Before we were involved, they were actually making these little tiny things under microscopes, handmade. And they would have a room full of people making these, and they said that sometimes people would work an entire shift and not make one good one."

The company put its problem-solving expertise to work and came up with an injection molded alternative to the handmade component.

Richard retired in 2008 and Dennis, who has a degree in plastics engineering from UMass Lowell, took over ownership and the presidency.

In 2010, the company changed its name to MTD and doubled its molding capacity. That marked a change in strategy, too. Previously, the company built turnkey molding cells for customers.

Tully said the move to in-house micromolding paid off. Sales have increased more than 50 percent 2014, hitting $8.8 million in 2018.

The next growth phase will start this year. MTD plans to break ground on a 12,000-square-foot expansion that will house a new tooling department, additional clean room manufacturing space, more material storage and conference space, and an employee fitness center. The project had been planned for 2018 but was delayed by the permitting process.

With 37 employees and 14 presses, MTD is the smallest company to be named Processor of the Year in the 22-year history of the award. Most previous winners have been big companies running multiple shifts at more than one factory. MTD's equipment is small, too: Almost all its presses are Sodicks, and all but one have 20 tons of clamping force.

Tully said MTD has been able to maintain its culture as it's brought on new talent. New employees and interns frequently end up being promoted to positions with greater authority. Hulecki is proud of the teamwork at MTD, pointing out that "not one person has all the answers. … Not one person can solve the problem, but as a team, there is no problem that we have never been able to solve."

Chief Financial Officer Leo Casey said MTD is "very transparent, and they share a lot of information with people, which I think is good."

He added: "This company also does a great job of taking people who are maybe a little longer in the tooth and facing retirement soon, and hiring potential people to replace them, which a lot of small companies don't do. So you've got people that are being brought into the company to help the company continue on a same path that they were on."

Tully, who would spend a few days in the office each week and had turned over day-to-day management to Hulecki, said during the visit that he felt good about the company's future.

"I think the future of medical micromolding is a huge opportunity. Two things are going to drive that," Tully said.

"One: Every company that's working on a device is always trying to make the next generation have more capabilities and be smaller, which plays into our strengths of being able to create fine details very precisely, which plays into our strengths of being able to create fine detail very precisely," Tully said.

"The next [driver] that we see as exciting is the introduction of drugs into bioabsorbable materials so they can be used for time-released applications, and things can be added that enhance the ability of this part to not only have a mechanical function but to aid by using a drug release that will help to promote better absorption or to alleviate some kind of a side effect that would normally be associated with whatever this is trying to conquer," Tully said.

Don Loepp writes in The Plastics Blog about MTD's next chapter.