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moldmakingtechnology.com 19 speed machining centers; CNC mills, turn-mills and lathes; OD, ID and centerless grinders; sinker, wire and hole-popping EDMs; and optical gaging systems and CMMs—all supported by modern design, machining and enterprise resource plan- ning software. An adjacent 22,000-square-foot building con- tains nine injection presses for mold qualification, including turnkey setups. The shop has also moved into high- and low- volume molding production runs during the past few years. Massie says he never intended to come this far. When the com- pany got its start in the late '70s, the then-10,000-square-foot floor was outfitted only with equipment needed to support the Cavaform process (turning and OD grinding machines to make mandrels and prep barstock, as well as gundrills and hones to hollow out and polish the stock prior to swaging). By then, he and the founding staff were more than familiar with the process. It originated with a fateful conversation between his father and a friend who worked for die manufacturer Howell Penncraft. Upon hearing about his friend's use of a rotary swaging machine to produce trimming dies, Bob Massie saw no reason why the process couldn't impart hexagon, taper, square and other com- monly swaged ID forms on much longer tubular components for molds produced at his own shop, Massie Tool & Mold. Before long, the die maker was supplying Massie Tool with rotary-swaged injection mold cavities for syringes, test tubes, pipettes, catheter tips, writing instruments, cosmetics and other such parts, and Bob Massie trademarked the term "Cavaform" (forming cavities) for this process in 1967. In 1972, his friend at Howell Penncraft notified him that another company was selling a similar machine, which was by then out of production. Massie Tool purchased it sight-unseen and moved it to Florida. As the elder Massie neared retirement and began antici- pating a buyout, he couldn't bear the thought of the niche machine and unique application falling into the hands of another company. In 1978, a year before selling Massie Tool, he purchased a separate building to house the machine and put David and his other two sons at the helm of an entirely new business, one focused solely on Cavaformed IDs (that is, mold cavity blanks with no waterlines or other machined features). Within a few years, sales had more than doubled, and custom- ers began asking for parts that are "fit for more than just show and tell," David Massie says. Although increasingly lean OEMs and molders demanding additional services fit with a broader industry trend, this shop had an advantage when it came to expanding capabilities over the years: Simply having the Cavaform process as an option boosted mold-building capacity to levels that otherwise would have been impossible to handle. The Bottleneck Breaker "Can we Cavaform it?" is always the very first question when the shop wins a bid for a new job, and for good reason. The conventional process for a mold with, say, 32 hex-shaped pen cavities would be to machine multiple sinker EDM electrodes, burn the cavities, then carefully polish each and every one. Burning alone could take weeks, while polishing might take as long as half an hour per individual facet to achieve an SPI A-2 standard. In contrast, the Cavaform process takes only minutes to churn out fully finished ID shapes that typically require only light buffing after heat treating. Additionally, the riskiest and typically most difficult part of creating a full, ready-to-install cavity—forming the ID—is done first. Above all, the company's EDM department and eight skilled polishers are free to focus on other work in the meantime. "It's a bottleneck breaker," Massie says. There's a reason why competitors have yet to replicate this capability, he says, noting that some even purchase their own mold cavities from Cavaform. Modern rotary swaging equip- ment not only tends to be customized for high-production applications that have nothing to do with moldmaking, but also tends to be far too light to cold-form mold steel. In con- trast, Cavaform's machine is a more generic design, the brain- child of German engineers employed by Cincinnati Milacron in the wake of WWII. Based heavily on models used to make rifle barrels during the war—often under fire in underground bunkers—the machine is "built like at tank," Massie says. What's more, the machine's fully mechanical operation makes it both reliable and relatively easy to use. So says Reduced polishing time on multi-faceted cavities is a major advantage of the ability to produce off-machine fnishes like that on the blank above, which has yet to undergo any other work. As demonstrated by the blank on the left, the process can impart shapes with narrow ribs and other complex geometry in far less time than EDM.