What Are Breakdowns In Your Injection Moulding Machine Costing You?
Your injection moulding machine could be the most important part of your production. So when it breaks down, slows down, or it’s performance become inconsistent, it really hurts.
Because it’s such a complex machine, with many precision moving parts, there are so many things that can go wrong with your injection moulding machine:
Blocked suction strainers that are starving your pumps of oil, which causes cavitation
Hydraulic hoses fail due to rubbing on moving pattern
Inconsistent shot sizes due to sticky valves or contaminated fluid
Oil temperature fluctuations giving you a lack of speed control and consistency in movement
Oil cleanliness is often the main cause of breakdowns in injection moulding machine. And the difficulty is that you can never see the contamination in your oil. But don’t be mistaken, just because you cant see it, doesn’t mean it’s not doing real damage to the internal moving parts of valves, pumps, motors, cylinders.
And when this happens, cylinders start to leak externally, barrel bores become scored and leak internally, valves become sticky, pump performance decreases which slows down the overall machine performance.
SO WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOUR BUSINESSES PRODUCTION AND PROFITS:
Lost production
Slow production
Extra manpower that you probably don’t have right now
Producing inferior plastic components
The cost to your business can be anywhere from $500/hr to $100,000’s /hr.
In 2021 we had a customer with a broken down Injection moulding machine that had problems with injection control. It was costing the business around $28,000/day in faulty production.
As soon as we inspected, we could see that the fine micron filter prior to the moog valve had not been changed due to a faulty clogging indicator. We immediately did an oil sample which showed extremely high particle count levels. This was easily rectified with an offline filtration upgrade. Job done, injection moulding machine working perfectly again.
If your business relies on injection moulding machines, we can have one of our hydraulics technicians out within 24 hours anywhere in greater Melbourne; potentially saving your business thousands of dollars in production downtime.
We also offer Scheduled Inspection Programs, which has a Flotek Technician on your site every 3 months for 3 hours to ensure your important Inspection Moulding equipment works reliably for longer. Call 9397 0044
