Mack Cautions Vermont Residents About Spoof Calls
It has come to Mack’s attention residents in the Arlington, Vt., community have been receiving phone calls from purported solar companies, and potentially other services, that appear on caller ID to be coming from a phone number associated with Mack.
Mack is committed to being a good steward of the community, including its protection from fraud, and has alerted its phone carrier’s technical and fraud teams of the calls. It is important to note these calls are not originating from the Mack phone exchange or the Company’s network. Unfortunately, in the age of Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) it is easy for callers to deliberately falsify the information transmitted to caller ID to disguise their identity. Known as “spoofing,” this technique is often used to trick someone into giving away personal information that can be used for fraudulent activity.
Spoofing for fraudulent gain is prohibited in the U.S., which is why Mack is working with its carrier to reduce the risk of being spoofed. This activity is hard to combat, however, and the best way to defend against it is to be informed and vigilant. Never offer personal information to an unexpected caller, and if you receive a call from someone claiming to be from a familiar company or government agency hang up and call a verified number for that entity. For more information on how to protect yourself, visit www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/spoofing-and-caller-id.
Blizzard Doesn’t Stop Business at Mack
Despite its best efforts, Stella, the blizzard of 2017, couldn’t keep the Mack team from working hard for our customers. Get out of the cold and get an inside look at what was happening at Mack during the big Nor’easter. And don’t forget, you can get a look at the Vermont weather everyday by checking out the Mack Mountain Cam at https://www.mack.com/mack-mountain-cam/.
Navigating Resin Selection with Mack
By Scott Rishell, Design Engineer, Mack Molding
As a leading custom plastics molder and contract manufacturer serving a range of markets – medical, industrial, transportation, energy/environment, computer/business and consumer – Mack’s customers are varied and so are their needs. To meet the diverse requirements presented by costumer programs, Mack has vertically integrated services, including design, prototyping, supply chain management, machining, sheet metal fabrication, molding, painting, assembly, testing and even fulfillment. One area where we often find the most distinctiveness is in resin selection.
Mack has a wide portfolio of molded parts, and each is unique based on the customers’ requirements. Beyond aesthetics, like color, a material’s properties, processability and cost all play a key role in determining a resin’s suitability for an application. With thousands of grades to choose from, and new ones being developed to fill market niches, customers often turn to Mack to help them navigate the resin selection process.
Here are some of the key considerations the Mack team makes when making a selection:
Mechanical Requirements
A part’s strength requirements need to be considered as resin classes have various tensile strength, tensile modulus and elongation at break. Thermoplastic resins offer a variety of strength properties that can often be modified with fillers like glass or carbon fiber.
Chemical Compatibility
Many customers are concerned about how chemicals, including cleaning solvents and process reagents, interact with their resin selection. In these cases we consult published testing data from resin manufacturers that show a material’s performance in each chemical. In some cases the data may not exist and testing with specific chemicals will be requested.
Environmental Compatibility
Parts that will be exposed to extreme hot or cold conditions need to be made with resins that are rated accordingly, making the long term service temperature and heat deflection temperature critical performance metrics. Other conditions to consider include exposure to UV light and high humidity.
Commodity vs. Performance
Whenever possible Mack strives to pair customer applications with commodity resin grades due to the inherent cost and availability advantages that come with higher volume raw material production. Some projects call for specific properties – strength, heat resistance, etc. – which is where performance resins excel.
Amorphous vs. Semi-crystalline
Selecting amorphous resins can often be advantageous as they can provide wider processing windows and improved dimensional control due to their random molecular structure. They can be transparent and are compatible with many adhesives. Semi-crystalline materials offer improved mechanical and thermal properties but can be more difficult to process.
Material Shrinkage
The amount a resin shrinks during the molding process can have a huge impact on the ease of building a tool or developing a successful molding process. For this reason we try to select resins that have lower shrink rates whenever possible.
Once all of these factors are accounted for the list of suitable resins is typically cut down to a manageable number to consider. It is here that the Mack team leverages its proficiency with particular materials, coupled with expertise in supply chain management, to make the final determination of a grade.
If you have a part you are ready to put into production, would like to learn more about resin selection or are interested in any of Mack’s vertically integrated services, please visit us at www.mack.com or e-mail our team salesnorth@mack.com.
Scott Rishell is the technical lead on several programs at Mack, developing part designs for production processes. He works with customers to diagnose and implement solutions for design for manufacturability (DFM) issues, as well as reduce manufacturing costs through part simplification and process improvements. He has established an intimate knowledge of design, material selection, tooling and specialty processes for injection molding, including structural foam, and internal and external gas assist. Prior to his current role, Scott was a program manager in the Mack’s medical business, where he gained unique customer experience insights. He has a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Go West with Mack for MD&M
It’s January, so as sure as the mountains of Vermont are capped with snow, the Mack team is hard at work with final preparations for Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West.
The world’s largest annual medtech event returns to Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif., Feb. 7-9, 2017, with more than 20,000 industry professionals coming together for three days of sourcing, networking and education. Mack will have a significant presence with a prominent location – Booth No. 1801 – where the Company’s senior management and sales teams will introduce attendees to our capabilities as a full-service contract manufacturer with specialties in plastics design, prototyping, molding, sheet metal fabrication, machining and turnkey system assembly.
Whether you are interested in Mack Medical, Mack Molding, Mack Technologies, Mack Prototype or Synectic Engineering, our vertically integrated services have been organized to benefit your business throughout the product life cycle. The most important piece of the puzzle, however, is you! That is why we are extending an invitation to our friends, old and new, to take advantage of free expo admission – a $95 value! Use our promo code “INVITE” when registering to claim a complimentary Expo Pass. Additionally, you can use it to get 20% of a full conference pass if you are looking to take advantage of the education tracks.
For more than 30 years, MD&M West has been connecting industry-leading suppliers with the latest products and technology, helping bring products from concept to market. In addition to unparalleled networking opportunities and educational content, MD&M West is collocated with synergistic events like Plastec West, Design & Manufacturing Pacific, ATX West, Electronics West and WestPack, offering an unmatched interactive face-to-face environment to share ideas, challenges and solutions with like-minded peers.
If you would like to schedule a specific meeting time in our booth, please contact your business development manager, or Joan Magrath, Vice President of Sales & Engineering, at joan.magrath@mack.com or (802) 375-0312.
We look forward to seeing you at this year’s event – and remember you can find us at Booth No. 1801!
Statesville Continues Making A Difference
Not a team to rest on its laurels, Mack’s Statesville, N.C., employees continue to give back to the community.
Hope, love, courage, faith, strength, cure – these were the words that drove one of Statesville’s latest efforts as team members joined together Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016, in the Pink Ribbon campaign as part of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The Pink Ribbon is the most prominent symbol of breast cancer awareness throughout the world, and team members did their part by wearing all things pink.
In addition to donning brightly colored clothes – which many employees wore to honor loved ones who are fighting or have been lost to breast cancer – the team used the opportunity to promote awareness of the need for annual screenings and preventive care for women.
It is estimated more than 40,000 women and nearly 500 men die from breast cancer annually. Recognizing the impact of cancer in the lives of many people around the world, the Mack family supports the American Cancer Society’s recommendation of beginning cancer screenings at age 40 or sooner if there is family history of breast cancer so that individuals may utilize family history and preventative exams to best understand their risk.
Raising awareness in the fight against breast cancer was only one of the good works done by the Statesville team in 2016. The team again raised donations for My Sister’s House – a special place that addresses the needs of those fleeing domestic or sexual violence by providing sanctuary in a warm living environment – collecting holiday gifts for families in their time of need.
Statesville was also recognized by Purple Heart Homes, a charity that helps veterans with service-related injuries, in the organization’s newsletter. Mack’s Statesville employees raised more than $7,000 to be used to bring quality of life housing solutions to disabled veterans.
Way to represent Mack Statesville!
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