Anyone who voted in the UK general election and last year’s American presidential election is likely to have slotted their paper into ballot boxes manufactured for election solutions provider, Pakflatt, by injection-moulding specialist Crossen Engineering.
Operating from a 22,000 sq ft facility in Belfast with 32 employees, Crossen produces all of its own tooling, ranging from aluminium alloy moulds for small-to-medium batch production, through to fully hardened hot-runner moulds for runs of more than 500,000 components.
“Every mould we make is designed in VISI and manufactured on our range of Hurco CNC milling machines,” says Crossen’s business development manager Peter Crossen. “We’ve also recently invested in a Röders high-speed machining centre, mainly for the quick turnaround of complex mould inserts.”
The other side to the family-run operation is press tools. Crossen has 13 presses in place, ranging in capacity from 50 to 500 tonnes, and all press tooling is also designed exclusively using VISI and manufactured in-house.
“We review a customer’s CAD file in VISI and then design the tool around that file,” says Crossen. “We can easily make adjustments to aspects such as wall thicknesses, part radii and draft angle.”
Although the company has run the VISI CAD module for several years, Crossen has only recently installed VISI Flow, which is now playing an increasingly important part in the process. This ‘preventative analysis’ software optimises tool design and moulding parameters by detecting a range of potential manufacturing issues such as warpage, weld lines, air traps, filling issues and hot spots, while determining the optimum gate size and position, along with runners.
For further information www.visicadcam.com
