Wilmington Machinery engineers didn't just set out to upgrade the company's workhorse Series III extrusion blow molding machines. They reinvented their wheel.
The rotary blow molding machine enters its second generation with the debut of the Series III B, a completely redesigned wheel series that boasts improved mold coolant flow, better parison profiling, increased consistency, greater user-friendliness and reduced cycle times.
With the series, company President Russ La Belle said Wilmington set out to streamline turnaround times, in order to better serve its customers. The first series came out in the mid-1990s.
"One of the things that we're trying to do here is we cut down on the amount of time it takes to build one of these things," he said.
Featuring components with short lead times, the new series has a modular design that simplifies order fulfillment. Machines are available in tonnages of 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10, with between nine and 36 molding stations. Compatible with die heads that can produce as many as seven layers for either single- or dual-parison molding, they can churn out between 45 and 720 bottles per minute in sizes ranging from 6 ounces to 2.5 gallons.
"It is a modular-type of design, and the number of [mold] spaces is dependent on the number of bottles someone wants to make of a specific size," La Belle said.
The series is designed for producing containers that require special features such as labels and view striping.
Compared with its predecessor, the Series III B has a more robust modular clamping station, featuring pre-plumbed lines for air and water. It has dual-cam clamp actuation, a technology first incorporated into Wilmington's SB series for small bottles that significantly reduces wear on clamp components and allows for independent open/close control of each mold half.
A servo drive provides station-to-station consistency in clamp opening and closing. The automatic clamp open/close feature significantly reduces mold set-up time.
In addition to making changes to the clamping station, Wilmington also has added a unique spoke mounting arrangement of clamps to the axle that facilitates faster setups. "It is easier to do and takes less time to do than the previous arrangement that was on the Series III," La Belle said.
Because all water lines are plumbed in the platen, mold setup is also easier. The arrangement improves mold coolant flow and reduces cycle times.
Also new to the Series III B are controls from Beckhoff Automation LLC, Savage, Minn., that provide improved diagnostics. With the controls, the series is easier to use than its predecessor.
Like the earlier series, the Series III B makes use of Wilmington's distinctive radial adjustment design that allows users to optimize material and gives them the flexibility to use different-sized molds on a machine.
Overall, Wilmington says the Series III B machines are easy to set up, operate and maintain. They have repeatable movements and large throughputs.
With the new design, Wilmington can provide its customers plenty of choices — all within a framework that facilitates quick delivery, said La Belle, who spoke about the series last month, shortly after showing it to a prospective customer for the first time.
"They can be configured in different ways for the quantity of thing to be produced," he said.
Karen Hanna, copy editor
Contact:
Wilmington Machinery Inc. Wilmington, N.C., 910-452-5090,
Karen Hanna | Senior Staff Reporter
Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna covers injection molding, molds and tooling, processors, workforce and other topics, and writes features including In Other Words and Problem Solved for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Plastics Recycling and The Journal of Blow Molding. She has more than 15 years of experience in daily and magazine journalism.
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