Cleaning is unpopular with many employees who prefer the challenge of troubleshooting or machining. Cleaning is messy, sometimes monotonous, and can be a potential health risk. There can be prejudice in a company culture that associates the job of cleaning with a lack of talent. On the flip side,

other repair techs live for the cleaning stage. It is an area where they can relax, crank up the radio and scrub tooling for hours, while passing managers are impressed with the technician’s diligence on the job.

However, a top-shelf toolmaker is usually not assigned to clean molds. This responsibility is often placed in the hands of a technician who is not familiar with the mold-specific defects and function, or the critical seal areas of the tooling. Doing so will often create continuous mold performance issues and inflate the tooling budget through the addition of dings, burrs, rounded-over edges, premature plating or steel removal and mixed up tooling. These problems, in turn, can ignite the fires that are fought in a reactive system that does not monitor or count defects to correct root causes.