MD&M West: 10 technologies you should know

1. Guill’s extrusion tool with single-point concentricity adjustment

Guill Tool & Engineering (West Warwick, R.I.) showed off its new Micro Medical — an extrusion crosshead that uses micro-fine adjustment screws for precise concentricity adjustment during the extrusion of thin-walled and precision ID/OD medical tubing. Concentricity precision reaches 0.008 in. or finer per revolution, according to Guill.

Unlike previous crosshead designs with multiple adjustment bolts, there is one adjustment bolt controls 360 degrees of adjustment.

“Ultimately what we’re looking to do is at some point is get automatic feedback from the engaging system. So basically what they’ll do is they’ll be able to extrude the product, it goes into the tank, you’ll see what the finished product is as it comes out of the tank, and it’ll tell you where the error is in concentricity, where the adjustment has to take those that can feed a signal back to an encoder in a servo motor, move that around to actually adjust concentricity per the engagement system. It basically takes the operator 100% out of the system,” William F. Conley, sales manager of the extrusion division at Guill, told Medical Design & Outsourcing.

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