See Every Cavity, Every Cycle, Every Shift
Real-time production intelligence for extrusion blow molding, injection stretch-blow, and injection blow molding lines — without touching your machine controls.
Availability and Changeover Are the Two Levers
Molding equipment is capital-intensive, so uptime and throughput are what plant managers get measured on — and changeover downtime plus scrap are consistently the two biggest drains on both, ahead of anything else on the floor.
- Wall-thickness variation — the single most common defect in blow molding — goes undetected until it shows up as a leak-test failure or a customer complaint
- Changeover and mold-change downtime is estimated after the fact instead of measured live, even though it's consistently the biggest single drain on machine availability
- Scrap gets tracked as one aggregate rate, blending startup scrap (post-changeover, before the process stabilizes) with in-process scrap — two different problems with two different owners
- Reject rate is reported as a single percentage instead of broken out by defect type, so a wall-thickness problem and a short-shot problem look identical on the dashboard
- Production counts are still logged by hand on whiteboards or paper logs, per shift, per machine
Five Stages, One Bottleneck to Watch
Two-stage ISBM shown here — preform injection separate from the blow side, the most common path for PET bottles. Extrusion and injection blow molding compress this into fewer stages, but the same real-time capture applies wherever your line runs it.
Preform Injection Molding
PET resin, pre-dried, is injection-molded into multi-cavity preforms with a fully finished neck. Often run as a separate stage — sometimes a separate facility — from the blow side.
Reheat Oven
Preforms index through an infrared oven, heating the body to the stretch-ready range while the neck finish stays cool and dimensionally unaffected.
Stretch-Blow
A stretch rod elongates the heated preform axially while a two-stage air blow — low-pressure pre-blow, then high-pressure final blow — expands it radially against the mold.
Cooling & Eject
The blown bottle holds against the mold wall briefly to lock in crystallinity and dimensional stability before ejection — cooling time, not blowing, is usually the throughput bottleneck.
Trim, Leak Test & Secondary Ops
Degate if needed, pressure-decay leak test, then labeling, capping, and filling — only leak-free bottles proceed downstream.
An Interactive Model of Your Line
The same real-time tracking engine Tork runs on production lines today — watch it detect a stoppage and recover in real time.
LINE HEALTH: NORMAL STATE:RUNNINGSPEED:38 bottles/min
Built for the Molding Floor
Real-Time Piece & Cycle Counts
Photoeyes at natural choke points — the take-out conveyor, trim-station exit, leak-tester infeed — count output without touching mold-side electronics.
Instant Stoppage Detection
A non-invasive current clamp on the machine supply reads run/idle/stopped state from power draw — no PLC integration, install in under an hour.
Scrap Split: Startup vs. In-Process
Rejects tracked by cause and by shift, so a bad changeover and a drifting steady-state process show up as the two different problems they are.
Changeover Timing
Mold-change start/stop captured automatically, turning your biggest availability drain into a measured, trackable number instead of an estimate.
ERP Integration
Production data flows into SAP, Oracle, and other ERP systems for planning.
No Machine Modification
Current clamps and external photoeyes — your blow molding, ISBM, or injection equipment and its controls stay untouched.
Built Around How Your Plant Is Actually Staffed
Machine Operators
Live cycle-time and reject visibility on their own machine, instead of waiting for an end-of-shift report to know something drifted.
Mold-Change Technicians
Changeover duration measured automatically — the number that actually gets reviewed, not estimated after the fact.
Quality / QC
Reject data broken out by defect type, not one rolled-up scrap percentage, so root cause is visible without a floor walk.
Plant Management
Availability and changeover downtime — the two levers with the most direct line to profitability — as measured numbers, not estimates.
Before You Ask
Do we need to integrate with our blow molding machine controls?
No. A current clamp on the machine supply and external photoeyes at the take-out or trim stations pick up state and piece counts without touching the machine's own controller.
Does this work for extrusion blow molding, ISBM, and injection blow molding lines?
Yes — EBM (HDPE jugs and containers), ISBM one- or two-stage (PET bottles), and IBM (small precision parts) all produce the same class of signal at each stage: piece counts, cycle timing, and stoppages. The sensor placement adapts to the line, the underlying capture approach doesn't change.
Can it separate startup scrap from in-process scrap?
Yes — because changeover start/stop is captured automatically, rejects that happen in that window are tracked separately from rejects during a stable run, which is the split that actually points at root cause.
How long does installation take?
Typically 1-3 days per production line, depending on layout and the number of sensors required — the system starts collecting data immediately after.
The Same Capture Approach, Already Running in Production
Tork's real-time capture and downtime detection is already running on glass container lines. See how it works in practice for a manufacturer running it today.
Ready to Pilot This on Your Lines?
No sales scripts — just engineers who'll walk through what it takes to deploy on your line.