Packaging equipment
Have you ever wondered why some seemingly simple systems integration jobs take so much time and money to complete? The picture above shows a section of a film wrapper build by a French company, Cermex. I would estimate that this …
First I’d like to apologize for a term I’ve mis-used in the past, that of the OEM. I’ve always considered manufacturers of specific types of industrial equipment to be “OEM”s, or Original Equipment Manufacturers. After looking carefully at the various …
Today’s article is a guest post by Glue Machinery Corporation ***************************************** Adhesives Across Industries When is the last time you thought about glue? If you’re like most people, the answer is “not lately.” Adhesives are a part of our everyday …
Usually my work involves designing and building new equipment, or occasionally completely rebuilding and upgrading old machines. Last week I got an emergency call from an existing customer that their production line was down and they couldn’t get help quickly …
The system I am currently working on is a machine that packages small plastic components. It consists of a number of hoppers with linear vibratory feeders that convey the parts into a mechanism that weighs the parts and feeds them …
This week I made my first sales trip for my new consulting company. I returned to Knoxville where I had my old company ACS for 10 years and paid a visit to several old customers and friends. If you have …
The first machines I programmed when I started my old company ACS were primarily packaging machines. As I have mentioned previously I teamed up with NAS early on, becoming their de-facto controls department. In the beginning we built a lot …
Early in my career I became in involved in material handling systems more often than any other kind of project. For one thing, they were generally pretty simple from a controls perspective, just turning conveyor motors on and off, moving …
In another post I described an air filter tester built with NAS in the late 1990s. These testers were for automotive filters and generally were built around a single automation concept; a Cosmo leak tester or vision system for instance. …
This is another machine built with NAS in about the 1998-1999 time frame. As you can tell, NAS was a huge user of aluminum extrusion; for about 5 years or so the were the biggest 80-20 customer in East Tennessee. …
