Progressive Plastics : Anaheim Firm Uses New Technology to Color Molded Products

Remember how you ironed colorful transfers onto T-shirts when you were young?

If so, you can understand how Southern Plastic Mold Inc. is using the familiar concept to improve the manufacturing process in which decorative colors are heat-transferred onto plastic products.

With this process, called “in-mold heat-transfer decoration,” Southern Plastic’s owners--Charles Finkbiner, Mike Noggle and his younger brother Larry--believe that their company can set itself apart from hundreds of other plastic molding manufacturers in Southern California.

Company executives maintain that the process is faster and up to 30% cheaper than conventional silk-screen decoration methods. It is also kinder to the environment, they say, noting that no solvents or liquid paints are used. But perhaps most important, they say, the results are aesthetically superior to current methods.

“This is the technology of the future,” said Finkbiner, senior vice president of marketing. “There is a definite cost advantage to it.”

In conventional methods, a manufacturer first molds the plastic and then puts the cooled product through a secondary silk-screening process to color it. With in-mold decoration, the secondary step is eliminated.

With an in-mold decoration machine known as a simultranser, a thin foil with dry ink etched onto it is placed within the mold for the plastic. As hot plastic is injected into the mold and robotic machines seal the mold together, the foil wraps around the outline of the object and the ink melts into the plastic.

Within 45 seconds, the plastic and ink dry, and the coloring process is completed. Since the ink diagram on the foil can be changed easily, the color combinations are unlimited. The high-speed robotics machine is operated by a single person.

Southern Plastic’s owners discovered the technology while touring a Hitachi Ltd. plant three years ago. The technology was developed about nine years ago by Nissha Printing Co. of Kyoto, Japan but had never been exported abroad. Finkbiner claims that Southern Plastic is the only U.S. company to adopt the Nissha technology.

Until recently, one drawback of the technology was the imprecision with which ink could be transferred onto plastic. But Southern Plastic’s plant has more than 50 Japanese-made robotic molding machines that can accurately place the ink onto the plastic within one three-thousandth of an inch.

“Anybody could buy the technology, but it takes a lot of time and money up front,” said Merle Snyder, editor of Plastics Machines & Equipment, a Denver-based trade journal. “Southern Plastic will have a quality edge and cost advantages.”

With the help of its Japanese customers, Hitachi and Sony Corp., Southern Plastic was able to negotiate a “handshake agreement” with Nissha to acquire the technology. In exchange, Nissha gets to use Southern Plastic’s Anaheim plant as a West Coast development site, Finkbiner said.

Transferring Nissha’s technology to Anaheim has cost Southern Plastic about $400,000 and two years of employee training costs. Finkbiner said it will take a couple of years to recover the investment. During the past decade, the company has spent more than $10 million to acquire its advanced robotic machines, which must be modified for use with the Nissha technology.

The in-mold decoration business will this year account for about 2% of Southern Plastic’s sales, which in 1989 were $24.5 million. The company hopes that the business will make up 25% of sales within the next two years.

Southern Plastic’s owners have demonstrated their technology to designers at a number of major corporations, including Walt Disney Studios, Sony Corp., International Business Machines Corp., and General Motors Corp.

Finkbiner is trying to strike a deal with Apple Computer Inc. to allow Southern Plastic to produce the personal computer maker’s seven-color corporate logo on stickers that would be glued onto all Apple products. Bob Hughes, a tooling engineer for Apple, said he was impressed with Southern Plastic’s in-mold operation during a visit to the plant two weeks ago.

Apple uses a complicated printing process for its logos, and the company is looking at alternatives for improving the logo manufacturing, Hughes said. But he added that Apple is unlikely to make a decision about the Anaheim firm’s technology for several months.

Although the technology is promising, Finkbiner said the company has only two clients so far. He said the company could handle big orders for in-mold-decorated products by adding a few more robots and utilizing a new 18,000-square-foot factory next to its current 45,000-square-foot plant.

Vicki McConnell, a senior editor at Plastics Design Forum, another trade journal in Denver, agreed that Southern Plastic will have cost advantages as the only U.S. plastics firm using in-mold decoration.

“For high-volume manufacturing, it offers significant cost savings,” she said. “It also takes fewer steps, and you can get a better cosmetic quality than silk-screening.”

But she said the process is not without limitations or competitors. For instance, since the foil can tear, it can be hard to use in-mold decoration to make objects that have surfaces with many sharp angles, such as certain medical tools.

Vincent Lindgren, vice president and general manager of Acromark Co. in Berkeley Heights, N.J., said the cost-effectiveness of in-mold decoration isn’t proven. Lindgren’s company manufactures equipment based on an older decoration technique called hot-stamping, which competes with in-mold decoration but uses a secondary manufacturing process.

“It (in-mold technology) has potential, but I’m not losing sleep over losing my business,” Lindgren said.

Finkbiner acknowledged that the in-mold process has limited usefulness for large components or parts with sharp edges, but he said the technology is continually being refined.

Among the future uses for the technology is the printing of hologram designs on plastic items such as credit cards. Finkbiner said the company will be able to use the in-mold process to manufacture products with hologram decorations within a year.

“Printing holograms is going to be a whole new market,” he said. “That’s where the excitement is. Instead of taking away a share from someone else, we want to make the pie bigger.”