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Small marvels - 21.11.2007

At Freek heating elements are pulled into smallest wires – but traditional products have kept their place beside high-tech

Menden. Heating wires together with ceramic insulations are installed in tubes as small as threads at Freek in Menden. If a layman sees this tube, he can only be amazed by this marvel of miniaturisation. These smallest heating elements are used in the plastics and packing industry. As the outlet temperature at the nozzle decides about the kind and quality of the plastic, each degree centigrade counts. Consequently, each single nozzle has to be heated and the more nozzles are operated in one tool, the more effective the tool is. So it is important to produce heating elements as small as possible. "As we began, 24 nozzles were possible, now there are up to 192. Exactly this is our essential know-how", managing director Wolfgang Kaiser describes.

Only ten companies worldwide are able to produce this technology, which Freek continues to develop together with the hotrunner industry. But there is more to it than that. Wolfgang Kaiser: "We have not replaced the complete original range of products which held mainly heating elements for household appliances by small elements in the beginning of the 1990s". The brothers Wolfgang and Stefan rather continued the business with the big heating elements which they took over from their father. The result: only Monday 16 pallets with heating elements for tumble dryers left for Sweden. - hgm

Small marvels
Wolfgang Kaiser shows a coiled heating
wire: Together with his brother Stefan
he took over Friedrich Freek from their
father – beginning of the 1990s the era of
miniaturisation started at the producer of
heating elements. Photo: Hagemann

Source: Mendener Zeitung » Mendener Zeitung


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