The parts that make the parts: Guill Tool shows off in Anaheim

ANAHEIM, Calif.—With more than six decades of extrusion tooling experience, the Guill Tool & Engineering Co. makes the critical parts that make the critical parts.

The 65-person firm's tools and dies can be trusted in the most important extrusion applications—from the high-gauge industries of aerospace and defense, wire and cable and oil and energy, to the precise world of silicone and plastic medical tubing.

Guill Tool made the cross country trek in February from its four-floor West Warwick, R.I., facility to Southern California for MD&M West, a medical technology show that draws tens of thousands of people annually to the Anaheim Convention Center.

"We do some prototyping, but mainly a customer will come to us when they know the product they are going to make," Jacob Marcure, senior engineer with Guill Tool, told Rubber News at the show. "They have to be past the idea phase ... where finished dimensions, or at least a range of dimensions, are needed."

Guill provides the dies (not the extruders or downstream production equipment) for the highly precise medical plastic, TPE or silicone parts, and the customer ultimately owns the tool for continued production following the design partnership with Guill.

"They can get the crosshead they need to integrate into their lines through us, or they can go to OEMs or order the line and request that they put our head on their lines," Marcure said. "If they treat the tool well, it should last decades. Corrosive materials can hurt it. ... This often comes into play on the rubber side with silicas ... and cleaning the tool with harsh methods, like sand blasting, will reduce the life of the tool."

With medical tubing and componentry as its top market, Guill has two major business units: government and defense; and medical extrusion.

On the defense side, Guill Tool contracts extensively with the federal government for military submarine components in Newport News, Va., home to the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding yards.

"Last year, government was higher for us, and extrusion has been higher than defense in the past," Marcure said. "But overall, medical is probably our top industry. I do want to mention that we are trying to make inroads into piping as well, with oil and gas and irrigation."

While medical extrusion predominantly involves plastics, Guill Tool also can design dies for silicones, neoprene, EPDMs and TPEs.

The machinists and engineers at Guill are trained in the latest CAD, CAM, CFD and FEA programs. And Guill says its high quality standards are evidenced by the company's many certifications in defense, medical, cyber security, calibration and government contracting.

Still, the machines that make the stainless steel tools that make the parts also must be part and parcel of a tool and die shop.

As part of a relatively new medical machining program, Guill now offers 4- and 5-axis machining centers, high-precision machining and full wire EDM capabilities with a 0.008-inch hole popper.

Guill uses super-alloys and exotic metals for its tools, machining them to very close tolerances, Marcure said.

"We have a well-stocked shop as far as machinery goes," he said, including lathes, grinders and machines that design dies using a fourth rotational axis. "One of the main things we are looking at is trying to get word out on our research and development lab."

The lab is part of the West Warwick, R.I., campus, Guill's only location.

"Customers can come to the lab, run and test their products," Marcure said.

Prototype machining and rapid manufacturing enable engineers at Guill to develop and innovate solutions with the ability to modify parts.

"Guill multi-axis machines can produce a variety of sizes, complex engineering and geometric intricacies," he said, adding that wire EDM in the tools eliminates the force that a part surface must endure during extrusion.

This can protect intricate and fragile tooling, Marcure said, as well as provide higher tolerances and accuracy and improved surface finishes.

Guill has achieved a series of successes with multi-layer dies, most recently developing a reciprocal tubing die for wound drainage that reconfigures the internal chambers of the tubing.

Drain tubes can be inserted prophylactically to prevent or remove the accumulation of fluid in a wound, preventing infection and promoting healing.

Conversely, such tubing can be therapeutically inserted to evacuate an existing collection of fluid in a wound. Drain tubes also can be used to diagnose post-operative complications, such as an anastomotic leak or hemorrhage.

The reciprocal tubing die was released Feb. 4 at MD&M West.

"At a medical platform like this there is not a lot of rubber, so what you are looking at are plastics tools," Marcure said. "Specifically for silicone, we have an offering for wound drainage, created by extruding the product with a four-lobed, cross-shape profile.

"The lobed end goes into the wound, the body cavity, while the other end is connected to instrumentation. Normally, a tube like this would be extruded separately and cut-to-length.

"Here, there is no weld. With a crosshead that has a reciprocating tool, we can determine the length on the fly with seamless transitions, eliminating an entire process."

Guill has engineered the new reciprocal tubing die by replacing a traditional tip and die assembly with a linear reciprocating assembly that changes the tube's profile within a given length.

While cost is reduced, quality is actually improved, Marcure said.

Only one extrusion run is needed to produce a finished product, as opposed to multiple extrusion runs with tooling changes—along with an additional manual assembly.

"Our automated extrusion process drastically changes the extruded profile in production, with no need to join separate sections of internal profiles," said Tom Baldock, sales manager at Guill Tool.

At the expo, Guill also featured a new extrusion head featuring a mechanically assisted gum space adjustment.

The new 500 series is designed for the unique flow characteristics and processing challenges of elastomeric compounds.

The new method of gum space adjustment allows the operator to make an effortless adjustment from a single point using a common socket wrench.

"No more need to struggle with multiple nuts and bolts in order to adjust gum space, which leads to faster adjustments," Marcure said, adding that the visual indicator on the core tube allows the operator to see how far the gum space has been moved, making adjustments more accurate and repeatable.

"A lot of wire and cable customers need to change over quickly for material or color changes. This takes time to clean the head in between uses. We created a way to disassemble the head and clean it out much quicker."

According to Marcure, only half of a rotation of the cam nut is required to loosen and automatically extract the deflector from the head body.

Another innovative feature of the new rubber/silicone crosshead is a cast aluminum liquid-fed cooling sleeve that allows the user to switch out the cooling jacket in the event of a line obstruction, helping to reduce downtime compared to traditional integrated cooling systems.

The new crosshead is a drop-in replacement on most existing lines, however this crosshead design also can be adapted to fit any extruder design or line layout.