John Preiser: Fitness Enthusiast Finds Medical Manufa/cturing Rewarding
Editor’s Note: With this post, we are introducing a new blog series — Mack is ME! — to spotlight the people and personalities behind our services. Check back frequently or subscribe to the feed, as these profiles will be interspersed with news updates on a regular basis. We hope you’ll enjoy getting to know us!
Name: John Preiser
Title: Supplier Engineer
What does that mean? John works in the purchasing department of MackMedical, the medical products group of Mack Molding, where he sources, quotes, and qualifies suppliers for MackMedical. He manages supplier quality and assists in manufacturing.
Time at Mack: 5 years.
Favorite Mack memory: During his first year at Mack, John attended the annual Mack Holiday party, where snow is made (if Mother Nature has been frugal). There are sleigh rides, cookie decorating, a Christmas tree lighting, an enormous fireworks display, and a special appearance by Santa. He was impressed and moved by the company’s efforts. “Mack takes care of its employees,” he emphasized.
Most memorable work project: John works on a Class III medical device that allows low body weight patients (such as children) to receive treatment for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL). Mack has received positive feedback from both customers and health care providers. Through a world-wide map that illustrates all installations of the medical device, members of the Mack team can really see how many people are being helped. “Hearing feedback directly from patients is so rewarding. It’s clear that the products we manufacture are truly helping people.”
Experience: John majored in electrical engineering technologies at Old Dominion University in Virginia. He then worked for IBM. As a supplier to Mack, John worked at Nexus Custom Electronics. He was an engineering manager there before joining the Mack team.
Personal life: John grew up in southern New York and spent 10 years in Los Angeles before moving back to the East Coast. He relocated to Arlington three years ago from Rutland, Vt. John’s wife, Nicole, teaches physics at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vt., and his son, Adam, is 9. The latest addition to John’s family is a puppy named Cleo (inspired by Cleopatra).
When not at work: He is an avid cyclist and formerly raced mountain bikes in southern California. You can find him outside hiking, camping, biking all over Vermont and New York, or enjoying winter sports.
Fun fact: John is probably the only person to drive a motorcycle with a bike rack attached to the back. Have you seen him before? It’s possible, as he has quite the paparazzi following.
Celebrating 100,000,000 Milkshakes!
Doing a double-take on that figure? Well, don’t. It’s for real — f’real foods, that is!
f’real foods is a frozen blended beverage company that began selling milkshakes, smoothies and frozen cappuccinos to convenience stores, along with a self-serve blender, in 2003. About three years later, Smith Dairy (Orrville, Ohio) came on board as a key supplier to fill the milkshake cups. And today, Smith filled its 100,000,000th cup. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to serve roughly one in every three people in the United States with a f’real milkshake from Smith Dairy. Of course, that’s not how it really breaks down, since once you’ve tried a f’real milkshake, you keep on coming back for more!
To celebrate the impressive milestone, f’real ordered a “gold” blender cup carriage for Mack to install in a self-serve blender that will soon be presented to Smith Dairy employees.
The f’real team at Mack was also recognized for a record month of blender manufacturing and sales. “We’ve enjoyed very good continued growth as a company, especially with our next generation blender,” says Ed Wilks, director of equipment operations, f’real foods. “Mack’s capabilities have stepped up to our needs as our demand for more blenders has exceeded our expectations month after month. This month’s forecast was a record one by a significant percentage – not only did Mack meet the forecast demand but they exceeded it and built safety stock as well.”
Before shipping the “golden blender” to Smith Dairy, the f’real team at Mack assembled for a photo to commemorate the accomplishment. “You are all to be congratulated for the work you have done to make this moment possible,” said Wilks. “You are an extension of f’real foods and we are extremely proud to have you as part of our team.”
Mack Engineer to Speak at Plastics in Medical Devices
Michael Hansen, PhD
Michael Hansen, PhD, Mack senior technical development engineer, will speak next week at Plastics in Medical Devices in Cleveland. His presentation will focus on the use of external gas-assist molding for medical device applications, including a show & tell of real-life applications that help to illustrate the technique, its benefits, advantages vs. internal gas-assist, and the resulting benefits for medical applications. Several critical steps must be taken when evaluating whether an application is suitable for external gas-assist, which he will also outline as he discusses each of the six applications.
Plastics in Medical Devices, sponsored by Plastics News, will take place June 11-13 at LaCentre Conference Facility in Westlake. The program content covers each part of the supply chain and includes the hottest topics: the FDA regulatory process, new ways to think about innovation, and how new technologies are being used to address value-driven engineering and hospital-acquired infections.
You can find out more at www.plasticsnews.com/pmd2012 .
About the speaker
A graduate of the University of Paderborn, Germany, Dr. Hansen’s PhD is in mechanical engineering and plastics technology. Nearly 25 years in the plastics industry, 14 of it with Mack, Hansen has extensive polymer, processing and tool design expertise, which he regularly shares at both regional and national conferences. He has also published papers on these topics in over 50 publications. Dr. Hansen can be reached at michael.hansen@mack.com.
Mack Honored as Supplier to 2012 Medical Design Excellence Award Winner
Mack Molding Co. has been awarded as a supplier to the SnapPath 1000, the Silver Winner in the In Vitro Diagnostics category of the 2012 Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) competition. The MDEA winning products, and their suppliers, were announced at a presentation ceremony held last week in Philadelphia in conjunction with the eastern Medical Design & Manufacturing Show.
Manufactured by BioMarker Strategies (Baltimore, Md.), the SnapPath platform is an automated live tumor cell-processing instrument that helps medical oncologists determine the best treatment options for individual cancer patients.
Mack injection molds the disposable cartridge kit for the device out of polypropylene resin for reagent compatibility. The fully self-contained disposable cartridge houses all of the reagents and pipette tips required for single sample processing.
“Polypropylene has a higher shrink rate than most resins, which made consistent wall thickness critical in this part’s design,” says Randy Pell, Mack senior staff design engineer. “We worked extensively with the designer (HS Design, Gladstone, N.J.) on design-for-manufacturability issues to ensure correct wall thicknesses and flow pattern, to build a robust tool, and generally, to improve overall moldability. The base housing cartridge is the most difficult of the four parts to mold.”
MDEA-winning products excel in the areas of product innovation, design and engineering achievement, end-user benefit, and cost-effectiveness in manufacturing and healthcare delivery. The winning entries were chosen by an impartial, multidisciplinary panel of third-party jurors with expertise in biomedical engineering, clinical practice, diagnostics, human factors, industrial design, manufacturing, and medicine.
“We are extremely proud to play a role in the manufacture of this product,” says Jeff Somple, president of Mack Molding’s Northern Operations. “This award program is the most prestigious in the industry for medical device design and innovation, so we are very honored to be a part of it.”
For more information on the Medical Design Excellence Awards, visit www.MDEAwards.com, or email mdea@ubm.com.
About Mack Molding
Mack Molding is a leading custom plastics molder and supplier of contract manufacturing services. Mack specializes in plastics design, prototyping, molding, sheet metal fabrication, full-service machining and medical device manufacturing. Founded in 1920, Mack is a privately owned business that operates 10 facilities throughout the world. Don Kendall is president and CEO. For more information, go to www.mack.com.
ETM: How to make lighter, stiffer, smoother parts
Making a thick-walled part with an internal foam structure isn’t new. For decades, the plastics industry has been using the structural foam and microcellular foam processes to produce skin-core-skin structures with foamed bubbles.
The result is a light, but stiff, part that can be produced with lower tonnage and few, if any, sink marks. The downside is a swirled surface, due to out-gassing trapped at the part/mold interface, which ultimately requires secondary painting for good cosmetics. Several approaches have been employed over the years to improve surface quality, including gas counter pressure, hot/cold mold cycling, expanding molds, Teflon film or other coatings, co-injection molding, vapor polishing, and so on.
An ETM cell structure as viewed through a reflection electron microscope. Note: 500 µm = 0.5 mm.
A newer approach is expandable thermoplastic microspheres (ETM), commercially known as Expancel, which has been used for some time in the extrusion process but is only now finding its place in injection molding. ETMs are small spherical thermoplastic resin particles comprised of a virtually gas-proof polymer shell that encapsulates hydrocarbons as a blowing agent. The average diameter of the hollow spheres ranges from 6-45 µm. Fully expanded, the volume of the microspheres can increase more than 40 times.
The typical expansion temperatures range from 80º to 190ºC (176º to 374ºF). When heating the microspheres, the pressure of the gas inside the shell increases as the thermoplastic shell softens, resulting in a dramatic volumetric increase. Cooling stiffens the outer shell to its original state, leaving the light, expanded microspheres ready for use. Because little or no gas escapes from the microspheres, the surface quality of the molded part is dramatically improved.
The use of ETMs in injection molding enables part weight reduction while maintaining dimensional stability. Compared with structural foam or microcellular injection molding technology, the expandable microspheres improve surface quality substantially, reducing or eliminating the need for secondary operations. This is accomplished by controlling the size, density and skin layer thickness of the microstructure with the amount of ETM used.
During recent samplings, we have experienced base density reductions up to 50% in ETM-molded parts. This density reduction matches that found in microcellular foam molded parts, and certainly exceeds the 5-25% average density reduction typically achieved with structural foam molding. Part size and wall thickness, as well as the ratio of base resin to ETM, are determining factors in the process and must be optimized on a part-by-part basis.
The above post was written by Michael Hansen, PhD, Senior Technical Development Engineer, MackMedical/Mack Molding
michael.hansen@mack.com
