For our potential custom pultrusion clients, Creative Pultrusions offers a tooling guarantee that we believe is unique in our industry. Your tooling purchase with us is a one-time expense and carries a lifetime guarantee regardless of how many feet of material that you have us run through it. Whether it is 10,000 feet a year, or 10 million, you will never have to pay for tooling maintenance or a new die for that specific profile again. The lifetime tooling guarantee is a great value for all customers.
How the Rest of the Industry Does It
The customer pays for a die and is given an estimate. The estimate factors in how many feet of the product will run before their die will need maintenance. The die is utilized as intended until the hard chrome coating wears off the entry side of the die where the abrasive fiberglass rubs, causing wear to the tool steel. The tool should have been sent out for a re-chrome before that wear point.
Many times, the dies with worn entrance areas get flipped around and run until the abrasive fiberglass wears through the chrome plating on what was intended to be the exit end of the tooling. By the time that those dies are sent out for maintenance, the dies need both a regrind of the entire die cavity and complete re-chroming. This regrind and re-chrome will be at the die owner’s expense.
Our Difference
The above issues and added expense to custom profile clients are primarily caused by pultrusion companies not having a completely integrated tooling facility. On the Creative Pultrusions campus, our building #4 incorporates a dedicated tooling shop. For most profiles, in which we have the machining capability, we machine our tooling from start to finish. Additionally, we have our hard chrome coating facility in house.
When your die is removed from a production run, we inspect the chrome thickness, and when it is found to be insufficient, we send it to the chroming department. From there, we strip and re-chrome the die before the next production run. We can strip and re-chrome an infinite number of times.
If hard chrome coating never wears through, we never need to re-grind because there is no wear to your tool steel or dimensional integrity. All of this is done as part of our standard operating procedure and is included in our operational cost. There is no charge to our customers for the regular maintenance of tooling for the life of their business.
Pultrusion Capabilities
Our company has decades of pultrusion experience. Many of our pultrusion engineering and operating staff have been with us for 25 – 30 years or more. This expertise enables us to successfully take on complex or large profiles, reinforcement packages, and unique resin systems, which are not considered by other manufacturers.
We can pultrude various reinforcements beyond the typical E-glass used in the bulk of our industry. An example includes engineered fabrics utilized to optimize mechanical properties. In some instances, carbon fiber is utilized for exceptional strength and stiffness coupled with lightweight attributes. We have approximately 20 years of experience in pultruding polyurethane resin systems, which are not used by most pultruders due to their complexity in production.
We regularly process polyesters, vinyl esters, epoxies, and polyurethane resin systems. Not all profiles, reinforcements, and resins can be reliably processed on a pultrusion line. When you bring your application to Creative for manufacturing consideration, we will work with you to make the parts fit both your physical and mechanical requirements and our processing capabilities. If a profile or the requested construction cannot be pultruded reliably, then we will respectfully decline our involvement.
We help our clients design their profiles to be as pultrusion-friendly as possible. We have the foresight to take on pultrusion business that can be processed reliably. If value-added services are required, we can paint, drill route, and assemble to add value to your product.
