Reciprocating head for medical tubing This Guill tooling can be used to make tubing for medical applications, such as draining wounds.
What’s new? The reciprocating head, which features a new cam-lock design and linear reciprocating assembly that changes the tube’s profile within a given length, instead of a traditional tip and die assembly. The cam-lock upgrade — available on most Guill heads — is especially beneficial with applications that require more-complex crossheads.
Benefits Cost reductions and higher quality, due to the ability to alter the tube’s profile in a single extrusion run without interruptions, along with cost reductions. With the new medical tubing reciprocating head, only one extrusion run is needed to produce a finished product, as opposed to multiple extrusion runs with tooling changes along with a manual assembly operation to connect different tubing shapes. This eliminates the need for inventorying associated components and assembly and in-process inventory. According to the company, its newly standard cam-lock design is easier to use, and saves significant amounts of time for cleaning and changeovers. In addition, Guill’s new cam-lock allows quick and easy assembly and disassembly of the crosshead and eliminates the need for socket head cap screws. By removing and replacing the internals, a different profile can be extruded in minutes rather than hours. There’s also much less chance of the kinds of misalignment issues associated with mechanisms that have socket set screws. The cam lock requires only a half turn to remove and install the deflector tip, and requires no fastening hardware.
Guill Tool & Engineering Co. Inc., West Warwick, R.I., 401-828-7600, https://guill.com/
Karen Hanna | Senior Staff Reporter
Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna covers injection molding, molds and tooling, processors, workforce and other topics, and writes features including In Other Words and Problem Solved for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Plastics Recycling and The Journal of Blow Molding. She has more than 15 years of experience in daily and magazine journalism.
