Walk through almost any plastics plant in New England and you'll find machines that have been running for decades. The frames are solid. The clamps still hold tonnage. What's aged out is everything around them: the controller nobody stocks parts for anymore, the pressure transducer that drifts by mid-shift, the screw that was spec'd for a resin the plant stopped running years ago.
That gap between a good machine and an obsolete one is where Andruss-Peskin Corporation does its best work.
Who is AP Corp.?
Andruss-Peskin, known to most of its customers simply as AP Corp., is a manufacturer's representative based in Nashua, New Hampshire, serving New England and Upstate New York. The company provides expertise in measurement and control for the plastics industry, with a particular depth in upgrades and retrofits for injection molding, extrusion, and blow molding equipment.
That framing matters, because measurement and control is really what a plastics process is. Everything else is mechanical. If you can see melt pressure accurately, read barrel temperature where it actually is rather than where a drifting sensor says it is, and act on both fast enough to matter, you have a repeatable process. If you can't, you have a machine that makes good parts on Tuesday and scrap on Thursday, and nobody can explain why.
Why retrofit instead of buying new?
The math usually isn't close. A new press or extruder is a capital project with a lead time measured in quarters. A control system swap, a new sensor package, or a redesigned screw and barrel is a maintenance line item that can be scheduled around a shutdown week. Processors get modern data, tighter repeatability, and parts availability again, on equipment they already know how to run.
The other reason is quality. Most scrap problems trace back to something measurable. Melt temperature that isn't what the readout claims. Pressure spikes nobody catches because the transducer response is too slow. A mixing section that never fully homogenized the color in the first place. Upgrading the components that measure and move the polymer tends to fix the defect at its source rather than downstream.
What AP Corp. provides
The product side covers the plastics process end to end.
Machine controls. Complete control systems built specifically for injection molding, extrusion, and blow molding machinery, along with individual control components. For a plant running an older machine with a dead or unsupported controller, a control retrofit is often the single change that brings the equipment back to current standards, with modern process data, recipe handling, and diagnostics that a decade-old system simply couldn't produce.
Melt pressure measurement. Extrusion pressure transducers and the instrumentation that reads them, plus melt flow indexers, capillary rheometers, and polymer evaluation equipment for the lab. Accurate melt pressure is what protects a die, a screen changer, and a gear pump from a bad day.
Temperature sensing. Industrial RTD and thermocouple sensors, transmitters, thermowells, and custom OEM probes engineered for high-temperature industrial service. Good control logic is only as good as the sensor feeding it, which is why sensor upgrades so often ride along with a controls project.
Meltstream components. Feed screws in general purpose, barrier, and distributive mixing and melting designs, along with barrels, instrumented barrels, non-return valves, end caps, feed throats, and tie bars. When a processor changes resins, adds regrind, or needs better mixing at the same output, a screw redesign is usually the highest-leverage change available.
Leading-edge technology, applied practically
The interesting part of this business right now is data. Instrumented barrels, smart transducers, and modern controls make it possible to see a process drift before it makes bad parts instead of after. AP Corp. spends most of its time helping plants adopt that capability incrementally, one machine at a time, rather than waiting on a full capital replacement cycle.
Getting started
Most projects begin with a conversation about one problem machine. AP Corp. is located in Nashua, New Hampshire, and can be reached at 508-351-6200 or sales@a-pcorp.com.