Gene Cooke, President & CEO

Dry Ice Blasting and Manufacturing

Tyco is a prominent manufacturer of automotive connectors, and they have a lot of molds that they use. Quite compact in their design, the people on the floor at Tyco’s facility require several hours, about seven to be precise, to clean their injection molds, blow molds, and stretch molds. They were implementing lean manufacturing techniques in their plant as a part of their total productivity goals and were beginning to monitor their overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) scores pertaining to quality, availability, and performance. Having to stop during production runs and taking seven hours to clean a tool just isn’t practical, or sustainable—a huge headwind for their availability score. Cold Jet stepped in and brought that time down to an hour by using dry ice blast cleaning.

Steve Wilson, Global Business Unit Director - Plastics, Rubber & Composites

Cold Jet is changing cultures in the molding environment in how they clean machines, as well in how they deflash, deburr, or clean parts before they are painted

The Cold Jet solution offers a fully digital interactive interface providing full control and flexible pellet size (3 mm to 0.3 mm) for any type of substrate at any pressure. So depending on the substrate and the type of metal, users can choose a solution with the right type of dry ice, i.e., smaller pellets for softer use cases and larger for the more tougher ones—the process is very flexible. It also offers the freedom to choose the necessary air to dry ice mix as required, and the machine can save these settings into what Cold Jet calls “recipes.”

“We are doing a lot of work with complex molds, and our solutions allow manufacturers to deflash certain parts as well,” says Steve Wilson, Global Business Unit Director at Cold Jet. The company’s solutions ensure that environment and worker safety is the top priority as manufacturers’ reliance on chemicals is reduced. This is particularly great for industries wearing out their assets prematurely by chemical rubbing, which companies need to pay to get and, to get rid of. With several companies already on the trajectories of zero landfill initiatives, Cold Jet gets rid of everything, rags and chemicals, to provide a cleaner, more effective solution.

Solutions for Tomorrow’s Industry

The automotive, packaging and medical sectors are the three biggest areas of application for dry ice cleaning in the plastics industry. Cold Jet formulated the use of CO2 as cleaning, surface preparation and parts finishing medium.

Better Work through Continued Precision

The plastic and the molding industries rely on some of the most sophisticated machines—all-electric, servo platforms with repeatability within four decimal points—and adopt very scientific methods in their processes to make their parts. “Unfortunately, the state of the industry maintenance department is as it was when I started in the industry back in 1977 and Cold Jet wants to change that,” mentions Wilson.

Their goal is to bring state-of-the-art cleaning techniques to molding companies to allow them to be proactive in mold maintenance. Right now, manufacturers are quite reactive, in a fire drill manner. Even though they are aware of this, they just don’t have an easy alternative that the staff on the floor will proactively adapt to a better way of cleaning. Cold Jet is changing cultures in the molding environment in how they clean machines, as well in how they deflash, deburr, or clean parts before they are painted.

"We don’t sell a cleaning machine; we provide a cleaning outcome for a customer"

Cold Jet is showcasing something new so that manufacturers don’t have to put up with redundancy. Their objective revolves around delivering technology innovation to global markets, to field, train, and support their solutions and grow their footprint. Cold Jet is also overseeing its market expansion in China, inaugurating their fourth facility in the country. They recently expanded into Singapore and will be entering the South American market in the near future. It is their commitment to providing the same amount of support across every region in the world. Cold Jet has known for the past 30+ years that they are targeting all global manufacturing companies, whether it’s BMW, Boeing, or Procter and Gamble, or all those companies which have facilities all around the world. The company sets out to become a part of the manufacturer’s journey to be able to provide a consistent solution at each of their facilities around the world and to provide the same solution and same responsiveness to each manufacturing customer.