Profile A Conversation with … Quality Mold Inc. You have a full-service mold shop. What exactly does that entail? Steve Burke, plant manager: Quality Mold started out as a side business in Mike Hatfield’s garage, providing welding and other repair ser-vices. He is a journeyman moldmaker and could also build molds, and as customers’ requests grew, so did the company. He bought a Bridgeport and a grinder, and the company grew from there. Today, about 70 percent of our business is mold repair and revision work. We can do just about Quality Mold Inc. in Chandler, Arizona, builds new molds and tooling for a variety of everything in house except heat treating and industries, but its primary focus is providing engineering changes and mold repair, including specialty coatings. We also build new molds and conventional TIG and Micro TIG welding and, most recently, laser welding, as shown here. in fact we have three being built now. We have The company built a solid reputation for reverse engineering and rebuilding molds sourced six CNC machining centers, including Mitsubishi in China to make them production-ready, and prides itself on quick turnarounds and full-TV-500 and TV-700 high-speed milling machines, service capabilities. Matsuura MC-600VF and MC-1000V milling machines; we have four EDM machines (wire How did Quality Mold come to provide mostly mold and sinker) including two Mitsubishi EA12VM Advance sinker repair and revision work? EDMs with a Mitsubishi MELFA RV-12SL robot, and we have Burke: The company’s roots are in mold building, but we several Mitsui surface grinders with Opti-dressers. We have our came to do more repair and revision work back when every-own welding department where we can TIG weld, micro TIG thing started going to China. We had to change our way of weld and, in the last four years, laser weld using our LaserStar thinking, so would tell these customers that when their molds 7700-3 Series Open Workspace Welding Workstation. come in from overseas, give them to us. At that time most molds would come in with issues and we would work on them and get them to run correctly and get the dimensions in tolerance. It became our little niche business because a lot of Quality Mold Inc. shops would not touch a Chinese-built mold. We would say 400 E. Comstock Drive send them to us; we’ll work on them. We became familiar with Chandler, Arizona Chinese-built tooling. A lot of it was all handwork and they 480-892-5480 would cut things close and then go in with the disk grinder qualitymoldinc.com and grind away until they got it to where they wanted it and leave it at that. None of the surfaces would be correct to a • Full-service mold manufacturer founded in 1995 solid model, so we would reverse engineer these molds and by Mike Hatfield, president. make sure they met specifications. • Specializes in designing, building and repairing/ We also do a lot of mold refurbishments. Some of our big-refurbishing single and multiple cavity molds ger customers had older tooling built in the U.S.A. in the 1980s ranging in size from 50 tons to 500 tons. and 1990s, so they will send them to us, and we will put in new • Types of molds built include shuttle and insert leader pins, bushings, locks, etc., and go over the molds and cor-molds, rubber injection molds, expandable and rect any issues like flash and make them some spare tooling as interchangeable tooling, multi-action molds, well. Their part designs haven’t changed any, so they have molds three-plate stripper molds, unscrewing molds, with several million shots on them that they would like to keep blow molds, metal injection molds, compression in production. We do whatever is needed to keep those molds molds and more. running. • Currently employs 14 team members. Besides molds, we use our two Fanuc Alpha-1iAs and our • Industries served include medical, automotive Fanuc Alpha C400iB wire EDM machines to do a lot of work and irrigation. for several aerospace customers. 10 MoldMaking Technology —— FEBRUARY 2020 Images courtesy of Quality Mold Inc.
MoldMaking Technology MoldMaking Technology - February 2020: Page 10
