Kipe Molds focuses on LSR, customers

PLACENTIA, Calif.—George Kipe definitely is an old-time rubber guy.

He started working in the rubber business in high school, formed his own tooling company in 1970 and he still works full time as president of family-owned Kipe Molds Inc. in Placentia, continuing to do much of his design work on a drafting board.

And he also is considered one of the early leaders of the liquid silicone rubber industry, jumping into the sector not long after attending a seminar put on by General Electric in the late 1970s. He made both tooling and finished LSR products, and the vast majority of Kipe Molds' business is supplying LSR firms.

Kipe started out with Fullerton Rubber in California while he was in high school, working part time in the summer months. He ran extruders and the firm produced super balls and hula hoops, among other goods.

It was there that he met Ron Bergdorf, who had moved out from Akron and was building tooling for Fullerton Rubber. “I ultimately worked for Ron building molds,” Kip said. “It was easy. I enjoyed it. And the good thing about when you run tooling, after awhile you get bored with it and start looking at the mold and things that could have been done to make it easier and more efficient.”

After working there a number of years, he started Kipe Molds. His wife took care of the accounting, and among his early jobs was to perform repair work and things no other company wanted to do. “You're hungry and reasonable in your rates, and I did it all myself.”

Early on, though, he realized the only way to get ahead was to have help from other people.

His father joined the business after being laid off from General Dynamics. When business started growing, his dad started working on cultivating new accounts. One of those was the U.S. Divers Co. when the Cousteau family was heavily involved in the business.

“That was really fun because they were a really aggressive company, and they would come out with new ideas and new products,” Kipe said.

Kipe Molds continued to grow, moving from one location to another, each time adding space and machinery. “That was a period of time when there were more rubber companies in Southern California than there was in Akron,” he said. They didn't do the tonnage Akron did with tires, but there were more specialty companies.”

But many in the Golden State had the idea of a rubber industry that was dirty and polluting, which led to a number of closings and a sharp decline in the states' rubber sector. It definitely had an impact on Kipe Molds, he said, because the downturn left a number of qualified tool makers vying for less and less business.

“I learned early on that you really analyze the customer that you're doing work for,” Kipe said. “You understand where they're coming from money-wise and efficiency wise. You need to know if you make them something special, are they capable of running it?”

Kipe Molds kept afloat by continuing to do repair work along with extensive business for U.S. Divers.

Then came the seminar that changed his company's direction.

Kipe went to the seminar put on by GE as the materials supplier was starting to push its LSR lines, touting the ease of processing liquid injection molded products. Both GE and Dow Corning Corp. were marketing LSR materials and Kipe was fascinated by the taffy-covered material.

“I liked it and went out and bought a machine, a 40-ton Engel,” he recalled. “I like the plastics machine because it primarily was made to go fast. I didn't have that machine more than a week or so and people started coming to me. They all had something they wanted to try out. I would take a mold and convert it over and try it out for them.”

Not long after, Atari Inc. was introducing its 5200 game and the joy stick boot cover was made out of vinyl but it didn't work. Kipe Molds converted the mold over to liquid silicone. “There were some shortcomings in the mold, but basically they liked the parts and they started ordering parts from me. We couldn't make enough of them. We had to put on other shifts.”

Of seven rubber parts on the game, the joy stick boot cover was the only one made in the U.S. and the Japanese company wanted cost reductions. But Atari was fun to work with, he said, especially with the person the firm had in charge of tooling.

“The guy came down and said, "You know how Atari solves tooling problems? With money.' I said, "Great, you came to the right place.' “

Kipe told them how he wanted to reconfigure the mold, the firm made more tooling and had three machines making the parts full time.

At that point, Kipe was running both the mold making business and a molded goods company he called LIM Products. He said the management of a molding operation was much different than the management of a tooling shop, and as molding got busy he couldn't keep up with both.

So he took on Ken Lester—who had worked at Santa Fe Rubber—as a partner in the molded goods business, and the two formed Hi-Tech Rubber Inc. in 1982. The operation—now owned by Parker Hannifin Corp.—grew quickly. “We became the largest user of liquid silicone for GE west of the Rockies at that time,” Kipe said.

Over a period of time, Kipe said that Lester wanted to buy out his interest in Hi-Tech Rubber. Kipe resisted for some time, saying he wanted to wait until the business was worth enough to make it worthwhile for him to sell out.

About five years or so after the formation of Hi-Tech Rubber, Kipe finally sold his part in that business to Lester and concentrated on the Kipe Molds operation. “In hindsight, I probably would have been better keeping the rubber side of it,” Kipe said.

But his heart was with the tooling shop. “One thing I enjoy is to make something productive and make it in such a way so whoever runs the tooling can make money from it,” he said. “What's good with liquid silicone is you can get the silicone in and make a product in a very short period of time.”

Of course, it's not that simple. You make the molds and team it up with a machine, but Kipe emphasizes how important it is to find the “sweet spot” on how a given part should run. He said people today don't understand that, wanting to run processes at a certain time and temperature.

“My feeling is if a mold will run at 35 seconds and make good parts, it will still run at 20 seconds but may make crummy parts,” he said. “Are you better off making good parts or bad parts, because all this is just like baking a cake. When you bake a cake, you can't grind it up and make another cake.”

Communicating this to customers—along with the importance of buying quality tooling—is vital, he said, especially in dealing with people who may have less expertise in this industry. “Unfortunately a lot of times the decisions are made by the money people,” Kipe said. “They may not be familiar with the tooling, and you live with a bad mold for a long time.”

Once he and Lester parted ways, Kipe Molds had to work to build back a good portion of its business. The tooling shop had supplied Hi-Tech Rubber with its molds, but one of Kipe Molds' employees quit and formed his own company, and it became the mold supplier for HTR.

“I had a lot of contacts, and people who were interested in different types of molding,” Kipe said. “We developed a lot of other customers,” and an association with a major producer of baby bottle nipples that had begun even before the split helped steady the mold maker.

He also went out and bought a plastics machine and converted it to LSR because he needed to try out all the tooling before sending it onto customers.

Over the years, the LSR industry has come a long way in terms of processes, materials and molds, said Kipe, who runs the firm along with his son, Brint, the company's general manager.

And the elder Kipe still keeps up with advancements in the industry, despite the fact that he prefers the old drafting board to computer aided design technology. For example, he said it's important that prototype tooling be just as good as the production tool, or it won't repeat.

The firm also keeps up-to-date equipment on hand to make sure the molds are dialed in so it can be sent to the customer and adopted seamlessly into production. It also is an education process in getting customers to understand the value of quality tooling.

“It's applying the knowledge that we've learned here to the parts, and then sharing it with the customers, doing what you need to do to get it to work right,” Kipe said. “A lot of times, people don't want to hear the bad news.”