Having Too Much Fun to Retire.

* "My friends ask me why I don't retire. I tell them I'm having fun doing just what I want right now." For 73-year-old Robert P. Fried, having fun means making plastic products no one else can make--or not as economically--using his own patented vibrational molding process. His idea of fun is producing advanced prototypes or short-run commercial products for the likes of General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Pratt & Whitney, General Electric, and IBM.

There's little chance of boredom in the prototypes business. "We make 24 new products a month," Fried notes. Most recently, those new products have taken Fried's business into the promising new area of thermoplastic composites. He is especially excited to be working with Detroit's Big Three to develop structural prototypes for new generations of lightweight cars and trucks.

Parts from powder

Fried and partner Bernard Rottman invented the vibration molding process, known as Unifuse VIM, back in the 1970s. By that time, Fried had been involved with plastics for 30 years. He got his start at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote his B.S. thesis on memory effects in polymers in 1946, followed by an M.S. on the subject a year later. Then he went to work as technical coordinator for Burlington Industries, developing new fabrics from synthetics. In 1961, he formed Now Corp. in Staatsburg, N.Y. It was one of the first firms to apply Teflon coatings to cookware.

Fried and Rottman developed VIM as a result of a project for IBM, which involved a material that was too unstable for melt processing. Now Corp. had to find a way to mold it near its glass-transition state. So Fried studied metal sintering and figured out how to use mechanical and ultrasonic vibration to fuse the particles together without melting them.

From that evolved VIM. It's a method for sintering thermoplastic powders using vibration plus low heat--well below the resin's melting point. VIM can mold large parts with thick and thin wall sections, deep draws with zero draft, undercuts, and/or embedded reinforcements. The net-shape parts are generated with no waste and no molded-in stresses, Fried says. Because of its low-cost machinery and tooling (made of aluminum and wood), VIM reportedly beats the economics of injection molding, rotomolding, or thermoforming for short runs of up to 10,000 parts.

Branching out

Now Corp. was renamed B&R Specialties in 1990. Today, VIM is roughly a $5 million business, consuming 1 million lb/yr of resin--mostly LLDPE and PP. Much of B&R's production is not particularly glamorous: municipal garbage bins, medical-waste carts, industrial trays, and automotive dunnage. What makes those projects fun is solving technical challenges, such as making PE garbage bins rodent-proof by embedding wire mesh in the walls. In another case, B&R's LLDPE hospital-waste carts started collapsing when the FDA mandated 50[degrees] F higher autoclave temperatures. Fortunately, VIM proved able to process a relatively new resin, Shell Chemical's Carilon polyketone, that had the necessary heat resistance.

Fried's most enjoyable challenge today is exploring VIM's potential in composites. He is working with the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, a joint effort of the Big Three auto makers to develop lightweight body structures. Fried sees opportunities for VIM in truck beds, floor pans, underbody spoilers, bumpers, and battery trays. VIM allows selective placement of reinforcing fabrics and even steel bars. The process allows fusing one layer of plastic, then placing the reinforcements on top and encapsulating them with another layer of resin. VIM also can fuse reinforced skins onto cores of expanded PP bead or thermoplastic honeycombs.

B&R is pushing VIM toward higher productivity. Typical cycles for preheating, fusing, and cooling are 15-20 min. But newer equipment includes multi-cavity molds that can make up to eight parts simultaneously, and a shuttle machine that can demold a 25-lb part every 2 min. The newest machine in the plant handles five molds and can put out eight parts per hour, each weighing up to 130 lb.

Even larger parts are in the works. A machine being built now will mold parts up to 18 ft long x 6 ft wide. It's aimed at car and truck parts and boats.