Plastics Technology

AUG 2016

Plastics Technology - Dedicated to improving Plastics Processing.

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Tino Cantu, one of the most senior "alumni" at the reunion party, worked as a setup man and technician at Plastofilm from 1961 to '81. He can remember the old days of cleaning silver off x-ray film, which followed after the war ended. He has worked at another thermoformer, Transparent Container, in Berkeley, Ill., for the last 18 years. His son, Tino Cantu, Jr., also at the reunion, worked at Plastofilm for 25 years from 1982 to 2007 and was supervisor of cutting dies before leaving to start his own cutting-die business, TC Dies. Based in Wheaton, Ill., Plastofilm started up its first ther- moforming production line in 1957 and the first high-speed, inline continuous forming machine (reputedly another original inven- tion) in 1959. Plastofilm began its own sheet extrusion in 1966. By 1996, the firm had grown to five plants on three continents, with 550 employees and $280 million in annual revenue. Two of its biggest "firsts" were getting into medical thermoforming in the 1960s and continuous forming of carrier tapes for automated assembly of electronics in 1981. "Plastofilm became the medical thermoformer," says Tony Beyer, who started out as a toolmaker at the company in 1973 and worked his way up to plant manager at the headquar- With a Chicago blues band laying down the beat, some 50 former employees of Plastofilm Industries and an equal number of spouses, family members, and companions gathered in April for a first-of-its-kind reunion in the thermoforming world. The gathering, held at the Herrington Inn & Spa in Geneva, Ill., was quite possibly unprecedented in all of plastics pro- cessing. That's because Plastofilm occupies a special place in plastics history. It is reputed to have been the first thermoforming company—per- haps even the inventor of the process— and was by far the largest in its time and for decades thereafter. Plastofilm was started in 1941 by George Wiss, an engineer who emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1939. He started out with a contract from the U.S. Army to recover the silver oxide from sheets of photographic film of bombing missions during World War II. He was left with a pile of clear cellulose acetate butyrate sheets to discard and wondered if they could be reused in some way. That reportedly led to the invention of the first vacuum forming machine and process (Wiss was co-author of a patent). The first application was boxes to hold corsages for big bands like Glenn Miller's that played on Chicago's Navy Pier. By Matt Naitove Executive Editor Rockin' Reunion For Alumni of World's First, Biggest Thermoformer In one room, several centuries of experience at the granddaddy of all thermoformers. Plastofilm pioneered in medical thermoforming back in the 1960s and was the leader in that field. Fifty former Plastofilm employees gathered to celebrate the progenitor of today's thermoforming industry. 22 AUGUST 2016 Plastics Technology PTonline.com T H E R M O F O R M I N G Close -Up On Technolog y

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