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10 MoldMaking Technology —— APRIL 2017 Profile 251 W. Cherry Street Cedar Springs, Michigan 616-696-0940 cste.com • Founded in 1967 by owners and brothers Don and Tom Mabie; Donald Snow is president. • Operations located in a 40,000-square-foot facility; employs 50, including six apprentices. • Designs and builds plastic injection and compression molds, with a specialty in compression-form and trim-mold tooling. • Lead times average between 10 and 14 weeks. • Serves mainly automotive customers, but also builds tooling for the electrical and consumer goods industries. A Conversation with … CS Tool Engineering Inc. This automotive package tray is an example of CS Tool's compression-molded parts and demonstrates the types of holes the company's molds can produce using its proprietary tooling feature. Images courtesy of CS Tool Engineering. MMT: CS Tool specializes in compres- sion molds. Explain what this entails. Don Snow, President: CS Tool designs and builds two types of compression molds: thermoset and "form and trim." The tradi- tional thermoset mold has a compression bypass edge that helps to contain the mate- rial within the cavity and assist in packing/ filling out the required shape, so that after the load of material is placed in the mold, the heated mold closes and generates pres- sure to fill out the cavity. The bypass edge is approximately 3/4 inch tall with 0.001- inch clearance between the cavity and core halves of the tool. The "form and trim" types of compression molds, which can be designed to run as heated or cooled molds, take various types of material, including carpet, cloth, polyurethane sheet, polypropylene sheet, shoddy rag and even wood fiber, and use press tonnage to compress the material to a desired shape. Unlike the thermoset material that can be weighed prior to loading it into the cavity or the injection molding press (that shot size is controlled), this type of molding requires that the "blanket," which could be made up of various layers of materi- als, be laid into the mold-forming cavity. This can happen via the press operator or by a mechanized sheet-feeding system. This blanket is sometimes heated with an infrared oven system and formed in a cold tool, and other times the blanket is formed in a heated tool. What makes CS Tool a specialist in form- and trim-style molds? CS Tool: We have an extensive background in compression form and trim molds. Most of our work is involved in automo- tive, with specialties in the design and build of exterior mirrors, radiator shrouds and fans, speaker grilles, encapsulated glass, headliners and other interior/exterior trim features. We have been pushed by our automotive customers to develop a better way of trimming key features on their parts during the forming process. Typically, with automotive headliners, once formed, the headliner is trimmed using a robotic waterjet while being held in a fixture. The waterjet is a proven technology, but the need for more tightly controlled cutouts or holes, as they relate to the true shape of the headliner, has pushed us into devel- oping mechanical and hydraulic punches within our forming tools. Mechanical punches offer the advantage of low mainte- nance, and this removes any need for hydraulics, along with the potential of oil leaks in the tool. Additionally, with this type of compression tooling there is always the need to minimize the physical size of the raw material to reduce the amount of off- fall, which is the amount of material beyond the formed shape that is waste. One tooling design feature we worked on with our customer reduced their blanket size enough to save them tens of thousands of dollars within a six-month period. This zoom-up of the package tray shows one of the punched holes in an area on the part that would experience a lot of forming tension on the cloth. The proprietary tooling feature prevents the cloth from pulling away from the hole.