Plastix Plus
Building Plastic Products for
Emergency Services using a CNC Router
Mike and Pete were firefighters and started building plastic products for their department’s fire trucks. From Mike’s garage to their now 3rd location consisting of 4 separate buildings, they are the leader in providing specialized Poly products for Law Enforcement and Fire Departments nationwide and abroad. Plastix Plus now owns 2 Titan Series CNC machines from Techno CNC Systems. Their machines run 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, and they now employ 18 fabricators.
Plastix Plus designs and fabricates numerous items out of HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) thermoplastic. The products start their life in sheet form. All sheets are cut on the Techno Titan CNC’s. From there, the sheets are fabricated utilizing a thermoplastic welding process. Plastic is unique in that it does not warp, rust, fade, rot, mildew or stain like wood or metal, which their competitors’ products are built from.
On average, the company has about a 30-day backlog of orders. The logistics of processing those orders keep their staff very busy. “We try our best to minimize turnaround time, and with the help of the Titan CNC routers, we are able to do that. This results in happy, repeat customers. We are also constantly designing new products and refining existing ones as the needs of our customers change”, stated Pete. “Our primary focus is on local/state/and federal law enforcement and Fire Departments nationwide and abroad. Some of our notable customers include Homeland Security, US Marshal Service, FBI, Border Patrol, Texas Dept of Public safety, Cities of Houston, Dallas, New York, and Chicago”.
As the demand for their products grew, Plastix Plus had to find a faster, more efficient way to produce more and more. While they have over 600 unique products, it is absolutely necessary to have the ability produce the same product over and over. They found and purchased their first Techno LC 4896 in 2007. The company had terrific success and reliability with their first Techno machine and the service and customer support was outstanding, so they chose to keep a good thing going and invest in a 2nd LC Series in 2011. In 2023, the company upgraded, and sold off both of their original (still in service) LC machines, and purchased the 2 Titan Series from Techno. “By having these high quality efficient, reliable machines, it makes it a lot easier to commit to larger jobs, knowing that we can produce the parts at a rate that is needed to complete them to the customers’ expectations”.
“The CNC machines are a vital part of our business as they allow us to produce parts accurately and repetitively for assembly of our products. We started with one LC series machine, then bought a second LC series machine, and we currently use our two new Titan machines. The Titan series machines are extremely accurate and powerful. The Titan includes a 12HP HSD automatic tool changer with a 8-position tool rack, high-flow pneumatically operated dust hood which extracts all the chips and debris, includes high flow vacuum plenum which firmly secures the sheets to the table as they parts are routed and extracted from the sheet. Three pop up pins are provided for easy sheet alignment, and best of all the controller is easy to use and very reliable. The CNC routers have helped our business growth tremendously. The machines have replaced the slow manual cutting of parts that we originally did, and completely did away with “human error”, which also saves time and materials. The best thing about the machines is they always work, don’t take lunch or vacation time, and never call in sick! The precision and speed of a machine of this caliber is overwhelmingly profitable. We sold our first Techno LC Series machine for good money after 15 years of service when bought our first Titan. After seeing the capabilities of the new Titan machine with an automatic tool changer spindle, we didn’t hesitate to replace our second LC machine with another Titan, only 60 days later! The newer, higher spindle speeds allow us to produce products faster. Honestly, we are so satisfied with the Techno machines that we have never had any reason to look elsewhere. The training and phone support is incredible.”
“The Techno machines have done exactly what we expected them to do. They have been an integral part of our success in becoming the business we are today. Reliability is key in our business as breakdowns and downtime are catastrophic to our production. The Techno machines fire up every morning at 7AM and don’t shut down till 5PM that same day. Having that piece of mind is priceless”.
