Heat Staking Machine

In our office with Heide's poppy painting.

I contacted my buddy Thomas Nguyen in March to find out what was going on with him and things and at Vivid-Inc. Vivid was looking for a new location for their facility since they had had an electrical problem and small fire at their Santa Clara location.

Thomas said he was starting on a new project, a Heat Staking Machine for emplacing inserts such as those from Penn Engineering into plastic plates that would cover batteries, like clam-shells, for an electric car company. I don't know which electric car company but I can guess! Thomas gave me some diagrams of the clam-shells and said he wanted to heat metal plates that would hold the inserts up to 250 to 300 degrees F.

I first located a small pneumatic machine listed on the ebay site that might be a good place to start

Pneumatic machine listed on ebay.com.

and then worked on the project for several weeks, just a day a week, coming up with suggested heat strip designs using heaters such as those from Grainger. I selected 240 VAC heat strips to minimize the AC current to the heaters but then later on realized that they had only 120 VAC power. Once Thomas was satisfied with the heat strip designs, I began searching for controllers and other components.

Tempco Strip Heater.

I selected a temperature controller, the Inkbird PID controller plus a solid state relay, a heat sink, and a thermocouple. Thomas would need to purchase a controller for each heat staking machine.

Inkbird Temperature Controller, solid state relay, heat sink and thermocouple.

I suggested that I design and have Protocase build an enclosure or L-Bracket to house the temperature controllers etc as I did for the paint flow control systems. And I selected and recommended a Square D distribution box with appropriate circuit breakers to accommodate the power required for the heaters.

Thomas designed and built a large roll-around pneumatic press for the heat staking machine. He ordered the Strip Heaters, the Inkbird controllers and other components and then began working on assembling the whole system. I need to check back with him and see how he's doing.