Brampton, Ontario — StackTeck Systems Ltd. manufactured its first 5-gallon industrial pail mold using newly installed capacity that can handle all components of a pail mold in house.
The Brampton-based manufacturer of multicavity, high-volume production molds also has a new automation team that produced the company's first in-mold labeling (IML) robot for a pail, which was configured for both a single cavity 5-gallon pail as well as a 1x2 mold for 5-liter pails.
StackTeck incorporates its thin recess injection molding (TRIM) technology when molding pails, reducing the weight of an industry standard 5-gallon pail by 120 grams, according to Jeff Ngai, the company's engineering director.
TRIM thins portions of the wall beyond the conventional packaging approach for polyolefins with high melt flow indexes.
"TRIM involves molding ultra-thin panels with flow leaders that assist with part filling and maintain part strength. This approach allows StackTeck to offer part weight savings that support a sustainable approach for injection molded pails in the market," Ngai said in a news release.
StackTeck says it began this pail mold development by benchmarking several different 5-gallon pail molds with thick rim features that presented a cooling challenge. Most of the parts typically run in the range of 17-18 seconds.
For the standard pail design, two sets of collets were made using H13 material and KoolTrack steel alloy. With the H13 collets, a cycle time of 16.0 seconds was achieved, StackTeck says, while the KoolTrack collets provided a 1.8-second cycle time improvement and a final cycle time of 14.2 seconds for the standard pail.
In both cases, the ejection part temperature was measured by means of a thermal camera.
StackTeck says KoolTrack encompasses a range of cooling technologies to increase the productivity of its molds by means of: optimized cooling channels following 3-D part geometry based on heat transfer simulation; proprietary bonding that enables maximum conformal cooling; steel alloys with high rates of thermal transfer; and use of copper alloy inserts at key positions.
"We are committed to increasing our offerings that support sustainability and at the same time, we want to give our customers peace of mind, knowing that we are ready to deliver a fully integrated system as a complete IML molding solution," StackTeck President and CEO Vince Travaglini said in the release.