Guill Tool & Engineering will exhibit at the K Show, October 8-15, in Düsseldorf, Germany, Hall 1, Booth C90, where it'll feature several tools, tips and dies, as well as new developments. These include Cam-Lock, rotary die design, Single-Point Concentricity and the NEW Guill Labs enhancements.
Guill
Cam-Lock
Originally developed for the popular Guill Bullet tool, a unique Guill extrusion head that eliminates fastening hardware with a fixed centre design, multi-port spiral flow and gum space adjustment, Cam-Lock is now available on many of the company’s existing extrusion heads. The design allows quick and easy assembly and disassembly of the crosshead and eliminates the need for socket head caps screws. By removing and replacing the internals, a different profile can be extruded in minutes rather than hours. Since the Cam-Lock resets the internals in the right configuration every time, there is far less chance of error, compared to the assembly and misalignment issues with torqued socket set screws. It only takes half a turn to remove and install the deflector tip and no fastening hardware is required.
Additional features include fast tool changes (threaded retaining ring for the die and threaded tip retainer), dies remove from the front and tips from the back, tooling retainers for gum space adjustment, vacuum connections, simplified cleaning and reduced downtime and operating costs. For a busy shop with multiple products produced or a shop processing challenging materials that require frequent cleaning, this Cam-Lock feature on Guill heads offers significant time, labor and cost savings.
By rotating the tooling in relation to the material flow, the new rotary head design increases the wall strength of an extrusion, thereby allowing a thinner wall with less material. Benefits include only rotating the die, randomising any gauge bands or thickness variations and, in some cases, improving material properties of the end product.
Various sizes of tubing can easily be accommodated with this unique design that radically reduces set-up and changeover times. Typical applications for rotary heads include medical and multi-lumen tubing plus various high-end extrusions with interlocking layers or multiple striping requirements.
Single Point Concentricity
Guill's Single Point Concentricity extrusion crosshead uses micro-fine adjustment screws for precise concentricity adjustment, reaching 0.008” or finer per revolution. This single point concentricity adjustment is a unique Guill innovation for the extrusion of thin-walled jacketing and precision ID/OD tubing. One adjustment bolt controls 360° of adjustment. Features include the patented Cam-Lock deflector for quick changeovers, with a residence time of one minute at .5 lb/hr material flow, optimised usage with extruders measuring ½” and ¾” and a max die ID of .250.”
Additionally, the Guill single-point crosshead not only accepts both vacuum and micro-air accessories but is also ideal for pressure and sleeving applications. Fluoropolymer designs are available upon request.
The lab
Guill Labs combines the company’s state-of-the-art rheology lab services for materials testing with a new facility focused on test extrusion processes. Measuring the flow characteristics of plastics and rubber allows users of the rheology lab to predict how the material will behave, virtually optimise tool geometry and see their project in 3D CAD. The extrusion lab offers single and co-extrusion capabilities with validated Guill designs. Access to exotic extrusion processes such as rotary die extrusion of filament and tubular end-products is also available. Services include extrusion tooling, die cleaning, sample inspection and end-product testing. Users can actually calculate their extrusion run time in the Guill test lab.
Jacob Mancure and Peter Leary from the factory in America will represent Guill during the show, assisted by the team from Guill Tool Europe.