ABSTRACT
The Single-Minute Exchange of Die system can be applied to many types of machines. There are several examples involving plastic forming machines. They are switching resins, changing hoppers, cleaning out nozzles and die preheating. The operation becomes even simpler when the hopper is switched with a new spare hopper. Cleaning the interiors of hoppers for resin or dye changes is quite a chore. Resins adhering to the nozzles' inner walls and to screw surfaces remain there and mix in with the next batch of resin, thus contaminating the colors. Cleaning out nozzles is the most annoying problem in changing resins. When a die needs to be preheated, one extremely effective method is to use a steam generator and circulate hot water through the coolant channels to actually heat the die. A considerable amount of internal setup time used to be spent making forty electrical connections on a hot runner die after the die was mounted on the machine.
