F&S Tool: A Drive for Speed Ushers in Success

You might say that Michael Faulkner, president of F&S Tool, and his brothers JD, Scott and Tim, got an itch that’s lasted seven years – the kind of itch that can only be scratched by making some big changes to a family business founded in 1983.  The injection mold building company was certainly successful, but the Faulkners needed (maybe the word is craved) to blaze a few new trails and grow their company into a first-class, full-service enterprise. 

A lot has happened over seven years.  Software and tooling upgrades, physical expansion of the Erie, PA, plant, implementation of lean manufacturing processes and investing in robotics is just the tip of the iceberg.   

Not one to rehash history, Mike Faulkner says, “Almost every mold making company started out in somebody’s garage.  It’s nothing new, and I’m bored with that stuff.  I’d rather talk about where our company is going today.” 

It’s interesting to note, however, that Faulkner and his father Jim started the company together.  The company’s focus was mainly connector molds and molds for medical products.  Twelve years ago F&S purchased an 8,000-square-foot building at its current location.  Today the building is more than 27,000 square feet and there are 55 employees working there. 

Faulkner, and his three brothers attribute the early growth to a lot of hard work and quality workmanship on multi-cavity molds, but as the years passed, the focus on the scope of services offered changed.   

“We wanted to build faster running, higher cavitation molds,” says Faulkner.  “First we invested in automation for our graphite and EDM areas, which led to bigger markets like the closures and consumers goods marketplace and all of that eventually led to developing a product development center for sampling our tools in both compression and injection.” 

In January of this year, F&S announced the opening of its new, $1.7 million Product Development Center – a key part of its overall customer service strategy and a major step toward establishing the company as a world-class supplier of compression and injection tooling. 

The expansion gives F&S Tool the flexibility to sample and debug tooling on-location.  Not more than 50 feet from the mold assembly area, a full-time processing engineer who has been hired onto the team works to “dial in” and “tweak” the process, thereby optimizing tooling cycles prior to delivering the tool to their customers. 

“The Product Development Center is absolutely monumental for us,” says Jim Dinger, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, who joined F&S three years ago.  “Today’s marketplace is beyond competitive with getting tools built and products to market faster.  We’re able to help our customers reduce lead-times by up to 20% and get them into the marketplace sooner.  By putting in these presses, it allows us to perform developmental runs with real products entering the preliminary distribution chain months before our customers were able to do it before.  We can run production tooling and real parts for our customers without having to interrupt their own plant floor operations.” 

One distinctive benefit of the Product Development Center is its Line Trial Bay – complete with Silo.  This area allows customers to bring in a press, automated equipment and/or secondary equipment and have F&S Tool’s process engineer prove out the entire cell, sampling and delivering a complete debugged system ready to go.  Dinger explains that customer use of the Line Trial Bay could save a minimum of one month’s time getting products out and to market.  On average, the company builds molds that are between 10,000 and 25,000 pounds apiece.  It would take approximately a week, for example, to ship one from Pennsylvania across the country to California. Modifications on tools, if necessary, can take days and sometimes weeks, not to mention sampling and assembling time and additional shipping times.  The cost of shipping itself can be prohibitive, but the Line Trial Bay helps reduce that problem. 

F&S’s Product Development Center includes a new single station pilot compression machine (simulates process conditions and parameters of 64-station and 32-station compression machine) 100 Ton VanDorn, 300 Ton Husky, and 500 Ton Husky Hylectric.  All presses have been fitted with the latest high-speed packaging options and software packages to maximize output. Of notable interest is the 500-Ton Husky Hylectric, which has an oversized platen and gives F&S the ability to sample all their Stack Tooling.  In addition to the presses, F&S has dedicated a full-time specialist to Hot Runner and Manifold inspection, repair and re-builds as well as several in-house designers to support Product Development.  A Zeiss, Vista CMM was also added to the facilities list to support in-process quality control with the goal of providing immediate testing and reporting for customers with those all too common “rush” projects. 

Though the Product Development Center is still very new, two customers already have tools in development that will take advantage of the service. 

Stepping Things Up

“When Mike and his three brothers completed the buyout, it signaled a turning point for the company,” says Dinger.  “That’s when the company really started taking off.  JD Faulkner, who is Vice President of Manufacturing, became a real force within the company at the time.” 

Mike Faulkner agrees, saying, “It wasn’t that my dad didn’t run the company well, because he did.  We were building what was considered high cavitation molds at that time.  Then, high cavitation meant molds with 8-12 cavities.  The industry began to change quickly and we realized we needed to step things up if we were going to be a leader in the marketplace. 

“We were looking at investing more than $6 million over the next seven years,” he continues.  “Anyplace we saw potential for growing our company and making money in our business, that’s where we invested in equipment.”  

The company soon began building its own mold bases in-house.  Several years ago while walking around at the International Machine Tool Show (IMTS) in Chicago, Faulkner said he and his brother looked closely at the latest cutting-edge technology and knew they needed to move in that direction.  Realizing that they could not burn electrodes fast enough, they invested in a system called Duct for 3-D machining and electrode construction.  Five years ago the company converted to the VisiCAD Solid Modeling system which they still use today.  

Lights-out and unattended machining time was what the Faulkners sought.  They installed robots on Graphite machines and EDM machines – four total feeding electrodes and milling machines. 

“We have EDM time in the thousands of hours in a year, which is rather unusual,” says Faulkner.  “Our operators are only working on average 50 hours a week.” 

F&S has also built a complete 3-D design department with five designers seasoned in compression and injection mold design plus two full-time programmers who do all their programming off-line and then download the data to the machines.  With in-house design services and an open dialogue between the toolmakers and designers, Dinger says F&S helps customers save about 1-1/2 to 2 weeks in production time. 

In addition, over the next year F&S plans an expansion of its design department to include four to seven additional seats of VisiCAD, including in-plant access for toolmakers. 

“We have computers at the wire machines, EDM machines and our new Zeiss CMM machine,” says Faulkner.  “We currently have eight seats and will expand to 12-15 users in the next year.” 

He says the company has worked closely with VisiCAD’s software engineers to help them further develop their design systems so that F&S then gets more of what it needs to optimize design services. 

“Because of our aggressive nature we are not a company that gets locked into traditional processes,” says Dinger. 

Some examples of F&S Tool’s innovative nature include developing a system of cooling with the tools to reduce cycle times; making inroads with processes that reduce machining times and others.  Five years ago F&S worked with System 3R on the development of its first machine that could operate up to two to three CNC machines at one time.  F&S owns System 3R’s 001 serial number. It replaces the single Workman robot and F&S recently purchased two Workmaster robots.  

The company has also worked closely with companies such as Mitsubishi, Husky, and Edro Engineering in blazing new technology trails and is currently working with technologies that are being developed in the European market. The proprietary nature of the projects prevented Faulkner and Dinger from expounding on it for this article.  F&S is also going through the patent process on a new auto unscrewing system designed to reduce cycle times on threaded parts by up to two seconds. All of this helps the company maintain a competitive edge, according to Dinger and Faulkner. 

“We are bringing in every operation we can for mold building,” says Dinger.  “We are about 90% complete in that aspect.  The only thing we farm out is side work such as gun drilling and large wet grinding details. That is part of how we maintain our quality and stay competitive.” 

Higher Cavitation Equals Higher Profits 

“We’re continuously analyzing our strengths and weaknesses,” adds Faulkner.  “Last year, during some of the slower times of the U.S. tooling market, we made our $1.7 million investment in the Product Development Center to sample everything from a one-cavity to a 2-128 stack mold.  We’re bringing in another machine this year and our goal is to reduce cycle times even further.” 

High cavitation and compression molds are a specialty at F&S Tool. The company regularly builds 32-, 48-, 64- & 128-cavity molds.  The current count is that the company has built more than 11 - 128-cavity molds that run cycles between 5.8 and 10-seconds, according to Faulkner. 

Heavily involved in the closures market, F&S also designs and builds molds for packaging, dairy/beverage, pharmaceutical, medical, and the consumer goods markets also. It’s evident that the seven-year plan is proving its merit. 

“As a result of this seven-year process, we’ve gone from a $3 million company to between a $9 million & a $10 million company,” states Faulkner.  “Automation and lean operations, including a streamlined setup of our plant, has helped us grow the company with minimal labor investment.”  

As if that wasn’t enough, he mentions that F&S also made an $80,000 investment into its assembly area so that the company can simultaneously assemble up to six high-cavitation molds.