In the Spotlight
Jul 1st, 2007                                Print this article

Kruis Mold & Engineering, Elkhart, IN

By Clare Goldsberry

Kruis Mold & Engineering and Indiana Plastics tune into a new saxophone, discovering that ABS can be music to one’s ears.

The Maui Xaphoon Pocket Sax graduates from bamboo to ABS.

It might not look like your typical saxophone, but it sure sounds like one. When Kruis Mold & Engineering Inc. was contacted by a musician living and working in Maui, they were quite surprised at his request. Brian Whitman had been hand-carving his “saxophones,” called the Xaphoon (pronounced ’za-foon’), out of bamboo for 20 years, but could only produce about 1,000 instruments annually.

As the popularity of the Xaphoon grew, orders began piling up to the point he knew he’d have to find a way to mass produce the instrument. And the solution turned out to be plastic.

Whitman heard about Kruis Mold & Engineering from a company that uses Kruis Mold and sister company, Indiana Plastics Inc., to digitize and produce mouthpieces for clarinets and saxaphones. “Brian thought it made sense that if we could do that, we could make the whole instrument,” said James Kruis, vice president of the family-owned molding and mold manufacturing businesses, adding that making the musical instrument is “fun and exciting” compared to most things that molders produce. But the challenges to producing the Xaphoon were very different as well.

First, they had to design the Xaphoon to recreate the sound of the ones made from bamboo. “We took his very best-sounding bamboo instrument and digitized those dimensions, then developed a prototype by milling it from solid plastic,” explains Kruis.

“We’d send it to Brian, and he’d make an adjustment, then we’d redigitize and recreate the instrument. We did this nine times over about five years so Brian could pay for the research and development efforts and the tooling with the profits from sales of the bamboo instrument,” he says.

Kruis recalls that material selection took some time as the material had to literally “sound” good. “We sampled the Xaphoon in several different materials. In the mouthpieces we mold, SAN seems to be the best-sounding material, but with this product we found that ABS has a good sound,” he said. The production mold is a family mold that molds one cavity each of the Xaphoon and the cap that protects the reed.

The Xaphoon’s mouthpiece is very similar to the clarinet, and contains an actual reed. The Maui Xaphoon Pocket Sax, as it is marketed, is one octave lower than conventional flutes of the same length, and sounds identical to the Bamboo Sax. The Maui Xaphoon Pocket Sax recently won Best In Show at the 2007 NAMM Music International Trade Show.

The Xaphoons are molded at Indiana Plastics, which operates 11 presses ranging from 30-330 tons. The company is currently in the process of changing out all their hydraulic presses for electric models. Indiana Plastics’ niche tends to be molds and molding complex parts that other companies can’t or won’t tackle, said Kruis. In addition to the Xaphoon, the company serves primarily the medical, commercial, and industrial electronics industries from low-volume, short runs (10-100 pieces) up to one million parts. Kruis Mold & Engineering also works with Asian mold suppliers to give its customers cost options on production tooling.

Kruis is proud of Brian Whitman and the success of the Xaphoon Pocket Sax. “There are so many people that you come across who have great ideas but in reality, they never come to fruition,” said Kruis. The Xaphoon comes in four colors, and currently Indiana Plastics molds 4,000 to 5,000 Xaphoons per year, as Whitman has sales representation throughout the world. You can visit Whitman online at www.xaphoon.com.

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