{"id":177,"date":"2015-08-25T13:47:42","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T13:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/?p=177"},"modified":"2025-07-17T10:17:35","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T10:17:35","slug":"can-you-achieve-s-m-e-d-on-a-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/can-you-achieve-s-m-e-d-on-a-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"Can you achieve S.M.E.D. on a budget?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The concept of Single Minute Exchange of Die has been around for a while, but for those of us working with a limited budget or a variety of materials (with different processing temperatures), anything under an hour would be nice!\u00a0 There are however some relatively inexpensive changes you can make, without having to result to budget-busting auto-tool change systems and magnetic platens&#8230;.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8216;Hard Piping&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>How often have you seen a setters legs dangling out of a locker, as he tries to find a long enough connection hose? \u00a0&#8216;Piping up&#8217; a tool from scratch takes time, leads to errors and often results in too many looped circuits.\u00a0 (Machines rarely have enough water gallery circuits).\u00a0 If you go to a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/equipment-suppliers\/mould-shop-consumables\">Mould Shop Consumables <\/a>specialist, you can buy pairs of colour-coded aluminium manifolds to suit (i.e. correct number of ports), each side of the tool.\u00a0 These usually have through holes for easy mounting directly onto the tool.<\/p>\n<p>By using cheap 90 degree hose-tails in the manifolds and tool ports, (make sure you match sizes, e.g. \u00bc\u201d BSP when specifying the manifolds), pipe runs are relatively flat to the tool surfaces.\u00a0 It may be necessary to fit `feet\u2019 to the tool, particularly if water pipe or the manifolds themselves are fitted to their underside.<\/p>\n<p>The inlet to each manifold will be fairly large, \u00be or 1\u201d BSP for example, so good flow is guaranteed.\u00a0 By fitting a large shut off fitting to each manifold, and a matching fitting to the main water supply for that manifold, you prevent the water from draining from the tool \/ air entering and causing corrosion.\u00a0 There are various styles of these shut off fittings, so you can make sure that the correct connections are made, e.g. in\/out or hot\/cold.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8216;Pre-Heating&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In some cases, time can be saved if you connect any warm water tooling zones to a spare <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/ancillary-shop\/temperature-control\/mould-heaters-controller\">Water Heater<\/a> in advance of starting a tool change. This operation is simplified if the tool is &#8216;hard-piped&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Purging<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you are also changing materials \/colours, a good <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/material-warehouse\/purging-agents\">Purging Agent<\/a>\u00a0will speed up the process and also reduce scrap rates caused by contamination.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Clamping<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Firstly, if your machine platens have T-Slots, use them wherever possible.\u00a0 A set of Lenzkes Clamps\u00a0with T-Nuts, or even a set of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/equipment-suppliers\/mould-shop-consumables\">Forged Clamps<\/a>\u00a0specified with a stud (threaded both ends), flanged nut and T-Nut will make it easier to secure a tool quickly and effectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The concept of Single Minute Exchange of Die has been around for a while, but for those of us working with a limited budget or a variety of materials (with different processing temperatures), anything under an hour would be nice!\u00a0 There are however some relatively inexpensive changes you can make, without having to result to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uk-plastic-industry","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2911,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/2911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plastikcity.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}