Plastics Trip: ICL Tech

Helen Campbell, Eilidh Gibson, Hannah Kirkbride, Matias Rinne, Robert Turner, Heather Walker, Erin Wallace

   ICL Tech Ltd has been a Glasgow based business since November 1973. It is part of the ICL Plastics Group which was formed in 1961 incorporating three distribution companies and three manufacturing companies located across the UK.
  

   They manufactures a wide range of products, including general fabrication, display work and specialist equipment for the oil industry, police forces and finance industry.


 


  
   We were shown around by Andy (who looks suspiciously like Jessie from Breaking Bad) who was a PDE student at Strathclyde university and went straight in to working for ICL Tech. His main role is to receive designs from customers and advise them how to best manufacture the product.

PROCESSES

    The plant consists of ~20 workshop staff and 5 administrative positions. We weren't allowed to photograph the inside of the workshop but we were shown the Vacuum forming process. This process consists of carving hardwood moulds first of all so that measurements can be altered easily. This is then used to form a cast to make an aluminium mould (sometimes aluminium filled resin but the best for moulds is just plain aluminium). We then saw the plastic sheets being heated up and the mould raised to cast the plastic, with each cycle taking approximately 6 minutes to form.

   These objects are then put to the CNC (computer numerical control)machine which trims the vacuum formed objects automatically, with an approximate cycle time of 3 minutes.There is also quite a bit of manual work that goes on, with some manual cutting and hot bending.

 INSIGHTS

   The main problems they come across during some of their processes is that their sister company, Abbey Screen & Digital Print, screen print the plastics before any moulding on bending so the design has to compensate for the change in shape of the plastics due to vacuum moulding and also the ink must be able to withstand the heat of the moulding and bending.
 

Some plastic samples that we were shown

    Also the cycle times mentioned above are presuming that the objects are fairly simple and made in bulk, if the objects are more complex or at a smaller scale the process can often take up to a day per unit to complete. For example they had been working on cash machine covers to try and win a contract which cost £450 per unit, much more expensive than normal, but this cost would be covered and justified if the contract was won and they could start making them more cheaply in bulk.

    He mentioned that they were constantly being updated on new plastics such as biodegradables but said that they would need to have a very high output to consider using these types of plastics, as the process would be different ultimately costing them more in setup.