Engineered Plastics Inc. President Dwight M. Davidson III will tell you a $3 million, 52-year-old family company is not a Goliath in the plastics fabricating field. But thanks to advances in machining and fabricating technology, this small custom thermoformer with 30 employees can perform its tasks as quickly and effectively as the manufacturing giants.

"Technology can reach down and make a small company efficient," Davidson says.

Davidson says he has a good vantage point from which to evaluate technology's effects. His late father started the Gibsonville, NC-based company in 1947 as a heavy gauge custom thermoformer, primarily manufacturing textile spindles. When the younger Davidson took over the business in 1993, after earning an MBA from Harvard University and a 13-year career on Wall Street, he says he found custom thermoforming to be greatly changed.

Gone was the reliance on one product, a spindle that the textile industry wasn't using much anymore, Davidson says. New products ranged across a broad spectrum, from medical devices to playground equipment to a plastic bolt for the U.S. space station.

For years, thermoforming has had "a heavy element of craftsmanship," Davidson says. "It is still needed, but so are the technological skills to take advantage of the consistency in quality that customers demand and that technology can provide.

"It's no different from fast food," says Davidson. "Customers expect their thermoformed parts to have the cookie-cutter uniformity of their burgers."

EPI's niche is from 100 to several thousand items, Davidson says, "not the onesy-twosies nor the hundreds of thousands. What you really don't want is the flaky stuff."

Innovative and creative is what the company excels in, he says, citing the bright-yellow "kiddie race car" EPI is making for a consumer-goods company to use in promotions as a classic example.

The customer, a sponsor of a NASCAR race car, wanted 1,000 pedal-powered copies of the real race car complete with decals. EPI worked with a promotions company to create it, first presenting CAD/CAM drawings, then a prototype of the car.

"We must have killed 15 sheets of plastic (making the prototype)," Davidson says.

The deep draw driver's seat was the major challenge. The customer had specified that the car walls beside the child driver had to be at least 0.030-in. thick. To achieve that thickness on the vertical walls, EPI had to start out with a sheet of plastic that was even thicker. Yet because thick plastic costs more, and the customer wanted to keep costs down, EPI had to depend on the thermoformers' skill rather than super-thick plastic to achieve it.

A single-station EMC Snow thermoformer was used to vacuum-press the car body. After experimenting with heat and other settings, Davidson says, "We're spreading that material like melted cheese over a tool."

Davidson says one of EPI's strengths is the creativity of its employees. After the toy car was thermoformed, employees discovered that the head of the Motionmaster CNC router was too large to fit into the tiny driver's seat area to cut a hole for the pedals, steering wheel and other gear.

Keeping A Sharp Focus One of the changes Engineered Plastics Inc. company President Dwight M. "Davy" Davidson has noted is that custom thermoformers have had to sharpen their focus with regards to capabilities. EPI focuses on four core capabilities: • CAD/CAM engineering • thermoforming • CNC and manual trimming • assembly. According to Davidson, instead of telling prospective customers "we're good at trimming," EPI tells them it can make a range of products using these skills. However, he cautions against focusing too narrowly on one industry or product. A narrow focus, he says, "puts you at risk of missing some great opportunities. For example, one of EPI's simplest, yet most ingenious projects, is a plastic tray with depressions for holding dozens of capsules. It resembles a toy game that is shaken to scatter objects into holes enabling the pharmacist to easily count out a specified number of pills, pushing them out a hole in the end of a tray. But if EPI had been choosing a sales niche to target, "we would never have said that's what we're going to focus on, pill counters," says Davidson.

So using hand routing tools and a fixture, thermoformer Glenn Martin built a machine to cut an identical "starter" slice from 1,000 cars. The cuts are enlarged later by hand. Such ingenuity, Davidson says, is the way small businesses survive. "You've got to have people that are creative and resourceful."

"We send our thermoforming guys to school," Davidson says. "They must be able to figure out heat and other settings for products like the housing for an oxygenator. This is a home-healthcare alternative to oxygen tanks that extracts oxygen from the air which has a deep draw or vertical measurement."

According to Davidson, EPI's skill lies in achieving that depth while keeping the necessary thicknesses throughout. The company also makes housing for an ultraviolet light machine used as a treatment for eczema and psoriasis. EPI also manufactures plastic kits to hold liquids for laboratory use and pharmaceutical supplies.

Other EPI products include an HEPA filter to remove minute particles from the air &emdash; airtight bonding is achieved during assembly &emdash; and a louvered panel for an industrial compressor.

In addition to the Motionmaster CNC router, equipment used in the 90,000-square-foot plant includes: an EMC Snow and Comet Industries thermoformer, a Brown & Sharpe CMM or coordinate measuring machine, which can measure tolerances down to 0.001 of an inch, a Milltronics Partner IV mill that can work in three dimensions, Powermatic band saws, and custom aluminum tooling that EPI orders from a Midwest foundry.

EPI works mostly with the thermoplastic ABS, which Davidson calls a "wonderful material" because of its rigidity and ability to take color. Acrylic is also important for multiple uses including the Glo-Ice trays for display of chilled foods that EPI designs and sells. Davidson says he still uses office trays of clear acrylic that he made 25 years ago as a teen working in the warehouse.

One of the first projects after Davidson's return, a plastic bolt to secure a battery in the U.S. space station, was made of an expensive plastic called polysulfone. According to Davidson, it was less affected by stress and temperature changes than many of the other thermoplastics, maintaining the strict tolerances required by the specifications.

The company also works with some thermoset materials such as nylon, Teflon, and PVC.

Marketing strategies have changed since the inception of EPI. The advent of internet technology has led to increased competition. As the internet makes information readily available, Davidson says, "We can all find out who makes these plastic parts."

Davidson wants growth, but logical growth. "Our growth strategy is not to be all things to all people, but to really find customers we can partner with. A core universe of companies that we can be important to."

EPI also makes its pitch to potential customers over the internet, as well as through a dedicated sales force and through written sales material. One job often leads to another.

"If you've identified a niche need, how can you leverage that?" Davidson says. "What we do for one, we could do for others."

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