A truck body manufacturer in Stuttgart shut down their assembly line for three days last February. The cause? A shipment of PET foam core panels with thickness variance exceeding ±0.8mm, more than double the acceptable tolerance. Parts wouldn’t seat properly in the jigs. Every panel in that batch went to scrap. Choosing a core material…
An RV manufacturer in Indiana traced a 40% warranty spike back to one bad batch of xps foam core panels. The compressive strength varied by 15% across the run. Panels warped inside the walls. Doors stopped sealing. Climate systems ran non-stop trying to compensate for thermal leaks. That supplier inconsistency cost $280,000 in field repairs…
A truck body manufacturer in southern Germany lost €220,000 on a single bad density call last year. They specified 60 kg/m³ pvc foam core for refrigerated van panels chasing a 12% weight reduction over their previous build. Six months into service, those panels started delaminating. The low-density foam had soaked 35% more resin during layup…
A truck body OEM we supplied last year scrapped 340 sandwich panels in a single production run. Their procurement team had switched from pmi foam core to PET to save €28 per square meter on raw material. The PET deformed at 165°C during prepreg co-curing, 15°C below their autoclave set point. That material substitution cost…
A thickness variance of just 1.2 millimeters is all it takes to crash automated routing machines and bring a vehicle assembly line to a dead halt for days. Once tolerances drift that far, entire container loads get rejected at the dock, and the delivery schedule collapses with them. When you specify composite core materials for…