What's the price of blow molding?

For the last 17 years, one of the most popular departments in this magazine has been the Custom Injection Molding Hourly Rates Survey. It gives molders an idea of how their rates for different machine sizes compare with the competition in all regions of the country. If you're unfamiliar with the survey, check out the latest results on our website (www.plasticstechnology.com). Click the link near the bottom of the home page.

For some time now, readers have been asking us to do a similar survey for custom blow molding. We plan to give it a try, but we need your help to do it right.

What type of custom blow molding would it make sense for us to survey? Extrusion blow molded bottles would seem to be the main target, but injection blow molded and stretch-blown PET bottles could be included. I assume that we should tabulate hourly rates separately for different blow molding processes.

What size bottles should we consider? Should we survey hourly rates for molding larger containers like jerry cans? What about toys or industrial parts? Would we need to collect separate figures for different industrial-size machines--continuous extrusion vs. accumulator head?

For injection molding, we tally machine-hour rates for presses of specific sizes. What criterion should we use to characterize the size of a blow molding machine? Or should we collect hourly-rate data by product size instead of machine size? If so, how should we define the different size ranges of products?

If you want to help define this survey, please e-mail me answers to these questions at [e-mail]. Many injection molders helped shape the hourly rate survey--here's your chance to do the same for blow molding.