IEEE’s Industrial Visit To Machinecraft
An Industrial visit to Machinecaft.org, Mira Road (East) was organized by the IEEE Committee of Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College Of Engineering on Tuesday, 23rd January,2018.
The purpose of the visit was to enhance industry exposure of the students and to get practical insights into manufacturing procedures. The committee visited the company to interact with the machine Industry and to understand current market scenarios, latest demanding technologies & criteria for selection etc.
Machinecraft was started in 1980 by Mr. Bhanuchandra Doshi, polymer chemist from UDCT, Mumbai. The company had it’s humble beginnings in the 80s when vacuum forming machines were introduced in India. The company grew at large and started using modern control systems and techniques with the advent of the second generation in the family company. Machinecraft has continually innovated and introduced forming machinery in India and have participated in global fairs like the K fair, Plastindia and Plastivision.
The company’s manufacturing is basically divided into manufacturing of the thick sheet and the thin sheet plastic producing machineries. Students were given tour of the factory by Mr. Rushabh Doshi. A brief introduction about the machine classifications and the overall machine processing units was delivered. Various pneumatic and hydraulic components were well explained to which the students were able to experience the real working of such systems that they had studied in the instrumentation subjects.
The company has come up with the advance thermoforming technique to manufacture machines that deliver accurate and high end results.Now, what exactly is thermoforming?
Thermoforming is a manufacturing process where a plastic sheet is heated to a pliable forming temperature, formed to a specific shape in a mold, and trimmed to create a usable product. The sheet, or “film” when referring to thinner gauges and certain material types, is heated in an oven to a high-enough temperature that permits it to be stretched into or onto a mold and cooled to a finished shape. Its simplified version is vacuum forming. This moulding process was well demonstrated and explained to the students. Thermoforming is usually used to make large parts that have small batch size instead of Injection Moulding.
The INLINE Series by Machinecraft.org has been designed to form thin sheet products using vacuum and pressure forming technologies. Machinecraft’s INLINE Series is a precision, high-speed continuous thermoforming machine in a compact and powerful package developed for the international thermoforming industry. Available with 3 or 4 station models: the stations being for forming, optional holing, steel rule punching and stacking. The machineries has it’s application forming a wide variety of materials — such as PVC, PS, APET and PP.
The company also has its own CNC machine. The students were shown a basic demo as on how the machine works. CNC are a contrast to machines that are manually controlled by hand wheels or levers, or mechanically automated by cams alone. The company produces their solid mechanical parts and components in the CNCs which are pre-loaded with a program.
The students got benefited in terms of the technical details provided by the organization on the modern manufacturing machineries and self-automation.
