The business of making toys isn’t exactly fun and games — more like the latest extreme roller coaster ride, complete with white knuckle loops, plummets, and 180-degree turns.
Famed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there are no second acts in American lives. Lucky for him he wasn’t looking north of the border, because up here in Canada, plastics industry pioneer Robert Schad is well into Act 2, Scene 4.
Most of us would probably consider being a lawyer as a safe-as-houses route towards economic security. Gerry Maldoff didn’t, and gave up practicing law for a career in plastics.
In 1963, Lester Pearson was Canada’s Prime Minister, the Beatles were still in Liverpool, and Branko Muich started working at a new Toronto-based custom extrusion shop called Polyform Ltd.
The mid-1960s was a long time ago, and you don’t last from then until now without reinventing yourself along the way.
For any hockey fans working at Winnipeg-based flexible packaging manufacturer Color Ad Packaging Ltd., these are salad days. First, you’ve got the Jets back. Second, Color Ad’s business is booming.
When it comes to drying polymers, figuring out the “why” is easy: to control viscosity and ensure maximum performance. It’s the “how” that can keep you up at night. Resin drying — especially involving…
Installation can be everything. That surround sound home theatre system in your man cave will sound worse than a two-cans-and-a-string telephone if it hasn’t been put in properly. Ditto chillers. Whether portable or central, the most…
Taking measurements to establish baseline data for an extruder system sounds pretty dull. Dull, but important. Simply put, when a new single screw or twin screw extruder is installed, or a new screw mounted in an existing machine, it’s…
For plastics processors, there may be no such thing as a recession-proof sector — but medical parts molding comes damn close. At the very least, the medical molding business is less susceptible to economic swings than most other…
If you’ve ever had a fractured limb, you know how unpleasant a cast can be. They’re bulky and uncomfortable — not to mention a blank canvas for embarrassing sketches by family and friends. But a Toronto start-up is using 3D…
We’ve all heard the old myth that an apple falling onto his noggin inspired Sir Isaac Newton to start thinking about gravity. A more recent myth holds that commercial purging compounds (CPCs) are for injection molding machines only. While…
There’s nothing wrong with writing things down on paper by hand — it’s how Shakespeare and America’s Founding Fathers did it, among others. But let’s face it: it’s no way to run a business in the Internet Age.
Whether you’re on the golf course or in a plastics processing plant, it’s never fun to wind up in a trap. In the first scenario, you probably risk bogey or worse. In the second, it’s even grimmer: wasting time and material,…
For the past few years, the Canadian Plastics injection molders’ surveys have read more like Stephen King horror stories than anything else, charting an industry in freefall and reflecting everything from declining utilization rates to…
This time last year, we opened our fifth Extrusion Benchmark Survey by noting that the worst of the worst recession in living memory was behind us. Twelve months later, we’re fairly certain it’s true. But what do some of…
If the manufacturing sector learned one thing from the Great Recession it might be this: get more efficient, fast. In multi-component injection molding, efficiency means eliminating secondary operations by assembling separate components in the…
It’s a strange time for plastics processors. Two years ago, you had the materials and not the orders; now, you have the orders but can’t always get the materials to fill them. And what the heck is going on with the U.S. and European…
Any plastics processor out there who doesn’t want to gain a competitive advantage, raise your hand. Nobody, right? Well, interest in one potential advantage is on the rise: A growing number of molders are considering liquid colorants as a…
