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Success Story: Custom Specs
Bruckman Excels at Meeting Custom Specifications
If the custom specifications of your job mean biting off more than most manufacturers can chew, you need to find someone with a bigger set of choppers.
Let Bruckman handle it!
Meeting multiple custom specifications is right in their wheelhouse. For one project, Bruckman formulated rubber to food-grade requirements, molded oversized parts and reused the client’s existing tooling to help keep their costs low.
“They were making these components in Asia, and they wanted to bring them stateside,” said Robert Woods, Bruckman Rubber technical projects manager. “That’s where we came into play. We’re over-molding rubber on their castings for them.”
Because the pieces are used for drinking water applications, a special food-grade rubber is required.
“They had two rubber specifications that we had to custom formulate that required an outside party to do the testing,” Woods said. “We developed formulas, and they tested them, and they passed.”
Bruckman Has the Tools for the Big Jobs
The size of the pieces might have presented a problem for other manufacturers but not for Bruckman.
“They came to Bruckman Rubber because our presses, the largest presses we have, have 36-inch-square platens with a little over 450-ton pressure,” he said, “and that’s what we need to mold their largest product.”
Bruckman was also able to use the client’s existing tooling, eliminating the need to build tooling from scratch for their entire product line, ultimately keeping the project well within budget.
“We had to work on their existing tooling to adapt it to our presses so we could run them on our machines, and they helped with some of the adaptations at their shop,” Woods said. “We had to do a fair amount of tooling work before we could even run them.”
Communication Makes the Job Flow Smoothly
Accomplishing a project with such custom specifications would not be possible without coordination between Bruckman and the client.
“We set up a weekly phone call with a project list that we review with them, go right down the list, and as soon as we get a product molded and sent to them, it comes off the list,” Woods said.
“It’s also a collective team effort on both parties. In our meetings, we deal with their purchasing department, we deal with their tool shop, we deal with their engineering, as well as their sales department,” he said. “Working on our end, we collaborate through our production team, as well as our tool shop. So we’re outreaching to all of our departments to bring this together.”
The project has been so successful that the client plans to send Bruckman even more work.
“Things are going well,” Woods said. “We’re molding product, and they’ll be sending us more tooling in the future so we can expand the product base.”
Bruckman specializes in solutions to eliminate the pain points that hold your company back. If you’re struggling with overseas operations, multiple vendors or low-quality suppliers, the answer is obvious:
Let Bruckman handle it! Contact us today to discuss your needs.