Honda Giken Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha

Hiroshi Mizutani

Atsushi Suzuki

Masayoshi Kai

Kazuya Sakamoto

Nobumasa Hamazoe

Hiromitsu Suganuma

Shinji Kazama

An upper unit of an injecting molding apparatus includes an ingot entry for introducing into the apparatus an ingot to be molded and an ingot heating chamber for heating the ingot supplied via the entry, and a lower unit includes a crusher for crushing the heated ingot and an injecting machine having an axially movable screw shaft for slurring and injecting the crushed ingot into a mold. The upper and lower units are interconnected via a flexible connector unit which is flexible in a vertical direction to allow the lower unit to vertically displace relative to the upper unit. By disengaging the connector unit from the upper unit, the lower unit can be disconnected from and laterally pivoted with respect to the upper unit to permit easy access to both the units. This displacement of the lower unit permits facilitated maintenance operations of the apparatus. A lower door provided for openably closing an ingot exit hole of the heating chamber is a vertically pivotable door that does not require a large operating space.

Injection molding apparatus

A receiving chamber receives a material heated in a heating chamber. An injecting shaft of an injecting machine slurries the material crushed by cutters downstream of the receiving chamber and feeds the slurried material to an injection port formed between the fore ends of the shaft and injecting chamber so that the slurried material is gradually accumulated in the port. The shaft is retracted by counteraction from the slurried material accumulated in the port, over a distance proportional to a current accumulated amount of the material in the port. The current accumulated amount of the material in the port can be detected from a current position of the shaft, and then it is determined whether the detected current accumulated amount has reached a predetermined amount. When the current accumulated amount has not reached the predetermined amount, the cutters and injecting shaft are further driven until the predetermined amount is reached. The receiving chamber has a pair of passage sections on its outer surface in opposed relation to each other, which function both as light beam passages for light emitting and receiving elements that are provided on the sections for detecting whether a heated material is in the receiving chamber, and as inert gas supply passages to direct inert gas into the receiving chamber.

Growing community of inventors

Sayama, Japan

Hiroshi Mizutani