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News / Innovations
DESMA establishes North American mold shop at Hebron Kentucky location
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 DESMA recently invested $1.1 Million in equipment, infrastructure and systems to enable the production of DESMA molds, cold runners and FlowControl valve gated cold runners at their Hebron Kentucky facility.
Against a growing mold business, DESMA realized the need for domestically produced tools for their customer base. In the summer of 2007, DESMA Management outlined a plan for investments, personnel requirements, and facilities improvements. As of this writing, the new Mold Shop is fully functional.
Heading up this endeavor is Derek Langtry, previously the DESMA Midwest Regional Sales Manager. Derek is a 10 year employee of DESMA, and a 15 year veteran in the rubber industry. "Derek was the ideal choice for this start up project. He has a strong understanding of what it takes to build and design tooling for our customers" said Scott Early, KDE Sales and Service, Inc. President and CEO.
To ensure the molds they produce are of a high quality, DESMA invested in new machining centers with specific capabilities:
- A vertical machining center, of extremely ridged design, capable of machining 1 m x 1.3 m mold plates with great accuracy. This enables DESMA to build molds for up to 700 ton presses.
- A horizontal turning center with multiple axis machining capability to produce cold runner components, and cavity inserts made of hardened steel.
- A large surface grinder capable of grinding all mold plates in house
What makes the DESMA mold shop unique is the ability to immediately test the molds they design and build in the same facility, using in stock demonstration presses located in their show room. DESMA typically stocks vertical and horizontal injection presses ranging from 25 US tons to over 700 US tons, with varying injection shot capabilities. "For years, we have served this market by keeping machines in stock earmarked for our customers. Now these machines can be used for testing the molds we build" said Early. "When a customer receives a DESMA mold, they will have a mold with tuned runners and vents. They will receive a mold that has been tested on injection equipment similar or often identical to their production equipment. This gives our customers a higher degree of assurance for a quick and efficient start up".
The DESMA North American Mold Shop also benefits from the 15 years of experience in mold design and construction at the parent companies mold shop in Germany. The DESMA North American Mold Shop runs Unigraphics, a design system shared with their parent company. Also noteworthy is the fact that DESMA North America established a data sharing platform with DESMA Germany to enable uploads and downloads of new and existing mold design concepts. "We have access to the many years of experience that resides in Germany" said Early. To help transition with this start up, DESMA relocated an experienced tool designer from Europe. They have also hired several local machinist / CAM programmers.
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