Features

K 2013 WRAP UP: MATERIALS

K 2013 WRAP UP: ROBOTS & AUTOMATION

K 2013 WRAP UP: AUXILIARY EQUIPMENT

K 2013 WRAP UP: EXTRUSION

K 2013 WRAP UP: INJECTION MOLDING

MEGA BRANDS lays building blocks for growth

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.

Schad’s Athena Automation hits the stage

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.

The man who helped KO TO’s plastic bag ban: Talking with CPIA Leader of the Year Gerry Maldoff

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.

After 50 years with one company, a plastics worker looks back

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.

Quebec’s Precimold is finding its own way forward

The mid-1960s was a long time ago, and you don’t last from then until now without reinventing yourself along the way.

Winnipeg’s COLOR AD PACKAGING finds its sweet spot

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.

DRYERS: The Necessary Nine

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…

Some Assembly Required: Chiller installation made semi-easy

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…

Setting a Baseline

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…

Medical Marvels

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…

Brace yourself for custom, 3D-printed casts

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…

Extruders Clean Up

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…

B&C Plastics: Highlighting competitiveness with the right ERP solution

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.

Avoiding Unforced Errors in Size Reduction

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,…

What Do They REALLY Think?

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…