Breaking the Mold at American Tool and Mold
American Tool and Mold is a pioneer in the tool and die industry in more ways than one.
For starters, it is owned and run by CEO Emilia Giannakopoulos, making it one of the very few woman-owned companies in the industry.
And American Tool and Mold has evolved into a full-service mold builder and molder with 160 employees. Its services include designing and manufacturing complex, 精度, multi-cavity molds for the plastic injection molding industry. It also provides thin-wall, 堆栈, 热流道, unscrewing and two-shot, high-cavitation molds for consumer packaging, specialty closures and medical industries. In 2023 it added a rapid prototyping division called ATM-X.
The Clearwater, Fla. company added MC Machinery graphite milling machines with automation and Mitsubishi wire 电火花s about two years ago.
As part of a multi-million dollar capital equipment investment, ATM purchased two Roku-Roku HC-658-II vertical graphite milling cells, each with a System 3R WorkPartner 1+ robot with 280 stations to automate electrode production and maximize unattended time.
“So we’re averaging somewhere about 100 to 150 hours, maybe even a little bit more than that some weeks, of unattended time, which was huge,” said ATM Senior Project Manager Steve Cochenour.
ATM also added two Mitsubishi MV2400-R wire 电火花 machines to increase throughput and capacity.
Cochenour said that when the company was in the market for a new wire 电火花 machine, they talked to “the big three” in the wire 电火花 market and sent each material and specs.
“It was a difficult material to work with. It was called Elmax and we asked each to do a real tight-tolerance hole through 10 inches of material,他说. “Those machines from Mitsubishi were able to hold the test cuts within the tolerances that we were looking for. And as far as I know, (MC Machinery) was the only one able to hold the tolerances.”