Tech Talk

Am I Being Paid to Automate My Own Job Out of Existence?

A dead transducer is not a minor maintenance issue. It is a safety hazard. Here is what I have seen on the floor, what goes wrong, and how to get it right. Pressure Is the Result of Everything Pressure does not measure one thing. It reflects everything your process is doing at once. Screw speed, barrel temperatures, material viscosity, screw wear, and screen pack condition all show up in that reading. When something shifts upstream, pressure tells you first. It is one of the

The cost of not acting is real. And it keeps accumulating while the decision waits.

Plants can many times be unaware of their unfinished business. Problems that get identified, partially worked, then quietly dropped when the person pushing them moves on. Nobody documents it. Nobody picks it up. The problem just keeps costing money. The Oval HDPE Pipe At one plant, a sharp extrusion technician looked at our equipment and realized we had capacity we weren't using. He pushed the extruders and got 20% more output from the extrusion pipeline...that was huge!

If you paused on that — this is where you close the gap. Are you a person in the plastics industry that has learned along the way through exposure? Picking things up on the shop floor, in meetings, from colleagues — a little here, a little there. And they get by? But getting by isn't the same as understanding. There's a difference between knowing what the settings are and knowing why the resin behaves the way it does. Between watching a defect appear and knowing what caused

Before You Improve, You Must Control

Seven Principles for Process Improvement, Control and Management

But here's what surprised me: after years running single-screw lines, I only knew one operating mode. It wasn't until I got into twin-screw extrusion that I discovered there were other options.