The shop floor was hopping in mid-January at Dukane Corp.’s headquarters in St. Charles, IL, 35 miles west of Chicago. Technicians were busy assembling, tooling and testing a variety of machines, including the latest product in the company’s arsenal of plastics assembly technologies: a hot-gas welding system.
Engineers from Dukane and a Tier 1 automotive supplier were testing the system’s ability to assemble two halves of a plastic air duct. When asked what he liked about the process, one of the supplier’s engineers said simply, “It’s clean.”