At the beginning of the system, empty, nested and stacked pails are loaded onto accumulation conveyor. The conveyor feeds a denester. The denester lays the stack down and individually pulls the pails apart. As pails are indexed forward they are first, positioned upright by the denester and then inverted on the conveyor. The inverted pails allow a sleeve label to be slipped on from above.
The printing/labeling station pulls the sleeve over the pail and adheres it. A three head printer prints information such as color, batch number and viscosity onto the label. The labeler has reduced labeling costs by ten percent and has eliminated waste.
Before being conveyed on to filling, the pail is inverted once more. The filling station nozzles are comprised of two sets of dual-heads mounted on a shuttle. One set of nozzles fills two pails at a time. At the end of a batch run, the nozzles are pushed aside and replaced by the two clean ones. This allows the first nozzles to be removed and cleaned without slowing production. The conveyor here, has a "soft start" feature that keeps the ink from spilling.
Next, lids are applied. The lids are stacked into a chute and the chute feeds individual lids to a set of rails. The leading edge of the pail catches on the lid and pulls it onto the pail. Stepped rollers seal the lid in place while the pail moves forward.
Pails are then sent on to accumulation conveyor and indexed into palletizing.
At palletizing two layers of twelve pails are double stacked. The palletizer raises a pail and another pail is indexed below it .The first pail is lowered onto the second and the pair is moved into place on the pallet, the next pair is built and positioned and so on until the pallet is complete. After palletizing, loads are conveyed to a stretch wrapper.
Once a pallet load is wrapped it is sent on to a Dematic pallet stacking machine. The pallet comes to a stop gate, where powered forks lift it. The next pallet arrives underneath and the first pallet is lowered onto it. The stacked pallets are conveyed onto a transfer car with powered rollers.
The system can provide 28 stacks of pallets per hour, which is faster than fork trucks can remove them. So, the transfer car takes the pallets to accumulation lines where they are staged for storage. At the end of each conveyor line is a turntable that reorients pallets for easy fork truck access.
"It represents one of the fastest returns on investment we have ever had. "
- Gerard Fusco, President of J.M. Hubber
