'Adrenaline junkies' fill need for quick turnarounds with suppliers' help
Key Highlights
- Elite Molds emphasizes speed and quality, utilizing relationships with suppliers like PCS and advanced additive manufacturing to meet urgent customer needs.
- The shop's adoption of Mantle metal 3D printing and Carbon M2 technology significantly cuts lead times, enabling rapid prototyping and production of complex molds.
- Strong supplier partnerships ensure timely delivery of components, with PCS providing custom-machined parts within days, supporting Elite Mold's fast turnaround goals.
- The company's level-loaded workflow maintains consistent productivity, avoiding traditional slowdowns and ensuring continuous project flow.
- Elite Molds' focus on innovation and collaboration positions it as a leader in rapid mold manufacturing for high-demand sectors like automotive and EVs.
By Karen Hanna
Problem: A molding shop challenges itself to fill niches for customers battling super-tight timelines.
Solution: Relationships with suppliers, along with newly adopted additive manufacturing technologies, help cut lead times, as well as labor needs.
Not everyone chases excitement by leaping from a plane or careening down the road on a motorcycle.
Some people build molds.
“We’re a bunch of adrenaline junkies,” said Paul Patrash, CEO and president of Elite Molds & Engineering Inc. “We have pretty good systems in place that allow us to move quickly. When we get the PO [purchase order] and we get the CAD model, we’re off and running.”
The Shelby Township, Mich., mold shop’s need for speed means hitting on all cylinders, all at once — from the design of the mold to its final polishing. Twenty employees who have bought into the mission are key to success, of course, but so are suppliers that understand there’s no time to cope with mishaps or wait on materials.
Days and hours are of the essence at the shop, which in early February was juggling a number of projects — including an urgent order for a customer that discovered as it was scheduled to make parts in China that it still needed molds.
Talk about a rush.
At Elite Mold, it’s off to the races.
“We’re fast on our feet, we’ve got decades of know-how and we’ve built a team of experienced craftsmen and engineers,” Patrash said. “We’re also big on continuous improvement and investing in new tech — whether it’s our Mantle metal 3D printer or our Carbon M2, we try to stay ahead of the curve and bring smarter solutions to the table.”
Maintaining a fast pace
Established in 1982 by two brothers, including Patrash’s brother-in-law, Elite Mold markets itself as a shop that can handle customers’ crises. It’s a niche that sets it apart from competitors.
“They can’t touch us,” Patrash said. “Our customers come to us just for that reason. We build them fast. The quality is excellent. Our relationships are strong with our customers. They count on us. ... A lot of suppliers, they may be able to do it once, but are you going to do it repeatedly? Probably not.”
Since around the turn of the century, when the shop focused mostly on molds and tooling for the automotive industry, Elite Mold has been diversifying, expanding into the medical, oil and gas, consumer products, transportation and military sectors, among others. It has Toshiba injection molding machines with clamping forces in the range of the molds it supplies — from 55 tons to 390 tons.
The shop’s services include beginning-to-end project management and flow and warp analysis.
Most jobs involve molds and tooling for prototyping runs and low-volume work.
Turnaround goals depend on the job and size of the part the mold will be making:
- Quote: Within 24 hours
- 4-inch-by-3-inch-by-2-inch parts: 7-10 business days
- 8-inch-by-6-inch-by-4-inch parts: 10-15 business days
- 12-inch-by-12-inch-by-6-inch parts: 15-30 business days
In the fall, Elite Mold took on a job with requirements similar to many it sees: The customer, a Tier 1 supplier, was behind schedule for a prototype mold for an electric vehicle (EV) battery component with complex internal geometries and tight tolerances.
The company needed the mold within three weeks, and Elite Mold had to find a way to make it cost-effectively; traditional steel machining alone wouldn’t cut it.
Patrash described the shop’s charge-ahead mindset:
“We’re a woodchipper. You’ve got to keep that woodchipper going. We don’t want to slow down. We don’t have that typical lag in the work that a lot of shops have, where you have three weeks busy and then you’re slow, two weeks busy and you’re slow. We’re level-loaded. We’re on 40, 45, 50 hours constantly.”
Sourcing components
To get the project done, Elite Mold relied on its suppliers, including one responsible for a recently acquired 3D printing technology that’s proved a game-changer.
“There’s no speed bumps in our way,” Patrash said.
The first partner in the pit crew was longtime partner PCS Co., which supplies mold bases and components.
Patrash explained that he trusts PCS because it moves with the same urgency as Elite Mold’s customers. With its voluminous catalog of components, PCS can fill most orders — but it also can custom-produce parts.
“PCS doesn’t sit still. They’re not happy with where they’re at,” he said.
“They’re looking to the future, just like I am. And it’s really good to see a supplier that does that. They’re not satisfied. They want to grow. They’ve got their eye on the next five years, 10 years, 15 years and beyond.”
PCS President Angela Elsey returned the praise, calling Elite Mold “a passionate, forward-thinking company, who challenges the status-quo of the industry.”
“We cherish those partnerships,” she said. “This is a challenging industry, and being a relationship-focused company is what drives PCS. ... Our goal is clear — partner with our suppliers and customers to drive the best value to the industry on American soil.”
PCS supplied a custom-machined mold base with specialty plate sizing, insert pockets and alignment locks in under seven business days.
“We can’t wait for components for weeks. We need them next day or in days. Most of our customers come to us and their projects are smoking hot,” Patrash said.
Pressing for time
To avoid some of the steps of traditional CNC work, Elite Mold next turned to one of the shop’s newest equipment pairings — a Mantle P-200 metal 3D printer and P-200 Furnace purchased at the end of 2024.
The printer — which along with a Carbon M2 forms a fledgling additive manufacturing lab headed by Patrash’s son, Parker Patrash — allows Elite Mold to eschew a lot of machining steps and labor while producing parts, such as serpentine cooling channels, that previously weren’t possible.
“You can have what would take three to four weeks to create in 14 days,” Parker Patrash said.
For jobs that can run unattended, the P-200 can produce the same part in 40 percent of the time required by traditional technologies.
The printer combines CNC machining with 3D printing of industry-standard tool steels to produce precision tooling that meets demands for accuracy, surface finish and durability.
“Those upfront labor centers are taken out of the equation for time,” Paul Patrash said.
For the Tier 1 mold, Elite Mold printed a conformally cooled metal insert, then finish-machined it in-house for precision fitment.
The printer knocked lead times down by more than four weeks.
While it didn’t use the Carbon printer for the Tier 1 project, Elite Mold is seeing benefits from both technologies, the Patrashes said. Unlike the P-200, which is appropriate for manufacturing mold components from metal, the Carbon M2 is appropriate for prototyping plastic parts with a quality similar to injection molding.
Both allow Elite Mold to keep the pedal to the metal.
“It’s been great. It’s cut out a lot of downtime,” Parker Patrash said.
Both he and his father said they believe the role of 3D printing will continue to grow in mold making.
The biggest factors so far hindering 3D printing’s expansion include one of Elite Mold’s big selling points — speed, along with the size of the print bed, according to Paul Patrash.
But the Patrashes said they believe additive manufacturing is only going to continue to improve.
“It’s gonna take maybe 10 years, but it’ll replace everything,” Parker Patrash said.
Hitting the finish line
For a customer like the Tier 1 manufacturer, which frequently requires rapid-turn, high-precision tooling, Elite Mold’s approach offered quick results.
With 18 days of the project’s start, Elite Mold was shipping the fruits of its labors.
When Paul Patrash speaks of his company’s reputation, he envisions a shop that answers the bell for its customers — especially when they’re already experiencing an emergency.
Coming to Elite Mold is like hitting a big red crisis button — “We got a big red dome on the top of our shop and a red light,” Patrash quipped.
Thanks to successes like the Tier 1 project, which resulted in even more business for Elite Mold, customers know where to go for help.
And, with suppliers like Mantle and PCS, Elite Mold does, too.
“Our customers come to us because they can depend on us, and I need to depend on my suppliers, just like my customers depend on me,” Patrash said. “So, when I go to an outside supplier, like PCS or a resin supplier, I need to know I can count on them to get that product in house to meet my delivery. And PCS constantly delivers on time or ahead of time. Their quality is always top-notch. I don't have to rework their components or rework their mold bases because the pockets are too small or the pockets are too big; they hit their numbers. That’s very important, I can count on that. ... They run a tight ship.”
Contact:
Carbon Inc., Redwood City, Calif., 650-285-6307, www.carbon3d.com
Mantle LLC, San Francisco, 415-655-3555, https://mantle3d.com
PCS Co., Fraser, Mich., 586-294-7780, www.pcs-company.com
About the Author
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.