As packaging volumes rise, material costs are critical. Not only are energy costs rising, but feedstock prices and hence raw materials are also on the increase. This places a premium upon skilled tool design to reduce materials requirements, and minimise total costs.

Mason Pinder's tool designers help all customers to achieve material cost benefits in a variety of ways; by process enhancement, by detail design modifications, and by the advanced design of multi-cavities or stack moulds to enable multiple production of items such as caps or closures.

Another special advantage of the Mason Pinder design team is the in-depth experience of screw fits, and the complete extraction system.

This makes the crucial difference to quality and yields of complex small caps and screw tops.

Process planning Mason Pinder's team checks all aspects of the process to achieve cost benefits.

This includes ensuring that the melt is delivered efficiently to the mould, keeping flash to a minimum by close fits, or using zero flash tools.

Mason Pinder designers also ensure that the moulding process operates precisely, and component extraction is effective, with minimal component stress.

When Bulmers produced a new PET container for their Sidekick Schnapps chaser, Mason Pinder worked with the moulder to redesign the hot runners, cut cycle times, and enable a less costly PET formulation to cut 40% from materials costs - a real saving for Bulmers on volumes measured in millions each week.

Detail design modification Wall thickness is crucial for any packaging product in terms of containment or strength.

Here Mason Pinder has engineered injection mould tools to achieve components with very low width to thickness ratios of 1:200 or more using standard moulding formulations.

This has been allied to advanced 3D flow analysis techniques, to produce large net savings in material quantities.

These analytical methods have also generated savings by enabling the use of presses with lower clamp forces (and thus lower energy costs) for some components.

Many benefits have also been achieved by engineering multi-cavity tools with up to 96 cavities, and by using stack mould techniques to double output from each single closure of the mould tool.

Component handling Production efficiency planning doesn't stop at mould extraction.

Mason Pinder not only designs automated component extraction, but has also developed unique automation solutions that take products all the way from mould extraction to quality control, counting, and bagging ready for delivery.

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