Creative Blow Mold Tooling's plant in Lee's Summit, MO, makes blow molds for plastic cosmetic, juice, water, and detergent bottles. Typically, a detergent bottle customer supplies Creative with only a finished bottle to use as a model. If the customer wanted to add a new size to an existing bottle series -- the most common design change request -- Creative adjusted the proportions of an existing bottle to achieve the desired volume.

When Creative's machine tools were driven by hydraulic tracing equipment, a request like this would set off a time-consuming four-step process. First, the bottle would be measured manually, the measurements would be used to generate a CAD drawing, the model would be scaled in CAD to achieve the new volume, and then a pattern was built from the new model for use on the tracer.

Now, three of those steps have been eliminated. Recently, Creative replaced the tracing process with digitizing -- using the Cyclone dedicated scanning and digitizing system, developed by Renishaw.