Mold-Masters, a leading developer and supplier of hot runners, controllers, auxiliary injection, and co-injection systems, is currently showcasing its latest products at Fakuma 2024: The international trade fair for plastics processing, being held October 15-19 in Friedrichshafen, Germany. The new products include hot runner systems, temperature and motion controllers, an auxiliary injection unit, a gate seal, and sustainable processing solutions.
The new hot runner systems include the Fusion Series® G3 and the EcoONE-Series™. The Fusion Series G3 hot runner system comes pre-assembled and features new enhancements to optimize mold design, simplify installation, minimize downtime, and enhance overall performance. These include system installation at room temperature; reduced nozzle bore cut-outs; compound nozzles; a heated nozzle flange; compact quick release actuators; and waterless actuators featuring passive actuator cooling technology. The system on display is also featuring Mold-Masters’Servo Electric Valve Gate (SeVG+) system which provides superior process control for demanding applications. SeVG+ is a servo driven actuation system that provides absolute control and precision over individual valve pin opening and closing profiles. The SeVG+ servo motor offers a compact 114mm height that minimizes stack height and simplifies mold designs. The EcoONE-Series 1-16 drop hot runner system is a highly economical, standardized solution suitable for processing commodity resins for simple, cost-sensitive applications such as consumer goods, small home appliances, basic automotive components, electronic peripherals/accessories, and more. It’s offered with a wide range of standard components including manifolds with custom pitch ranges. Recent product updates include the availability of hot half plates, a one-drop inline manifold option, a 16-drop manifold option, expanding the maximum dimensions of the manifold blocks to 600mm x 600mm and expanding the range of electrical connector options.
Also on display is the new TempMaster™ M4 hot runner temperature controller and the M-Ax™ mold motion controller. The TempMaster M4 features Mold-Masters’ new HR-Connect technology, which eliminates conventional mold thermocouple and power cables and replaces them with a single cable connecting the mold to the control head unit. Featuring an innovative new Mold Direct Mount design, the TempMaster M4 sets a new standard for temperature controller design.
The next-generation M-Ax mold motion controller features a simplified user interface with special features, including preprogrammed mode functions and energy and torque monitoring. Energy monitoring allows molders to measure and track the energy consumption of their motion controls, while torque monitoring can be used for a variety of purposes as determined by the user.
Additional products being featured at the show include the company’s E-Multi® product line of auxiliary injection units, which now includes the E-Multi mini. A compact, lightweight unit designed for small shot weights, the E-Multi mini is affixed to the mold and can be mounted in nearly any orientation. It also has a pivoting hopper that can move from left to right to accommodate challenging installation positions and is available with a wireless display tablet interface.
The Sprint® APEX gate seal minimizes flow lines, improving environmental stress crack resistance (ESCR) of CSD caps by up to 40% to support light weighting. It is also designed to enhance part quality, improve color change by up to 65% and minimize maintenance costs by eliminating the insulation cap associated with other industry standard gate seal designs.
Mold-Masters SmartMOLD mold monitoring industry 4.0 solution now has more system connection options. There is a 4G cellular option which makes connecting to SmartMOLD’s cloud servers simpler and keeps the manufacturing plants network separate. In addition, the company also offers a local configuration set-up where data is driven directly into the facilities own ERP and MES systems. In this local configuration the cloud servers are avoided entirely, and data does not leave the facility.
The company’s various processing solutions for bio-resins and recycled materials, are also on display at the booth. For example, Mold-Masters’ co-injection multi-layer systems maximize the use of recycled content. Mold-Masters’ technology allows molders to incorporate recycled content up to 50% of total part weight as the core layer positioned between two layers of virgin resin to maintain the aesthetic look of virgin resin. The co-injection technology is compatible with small to large packaging products and a range of other applications. Mold-Masters offers both complete system solutions and a retrofit package to convert conventional single shot injection machines to co-injection.
