According to Wikipedia, the longest conveyor in the world is a 100km behemoth in Western Sahara. See it in google mapshere. Even more interesting is the longest continuous belt conveyor, which is in Bangladesh and India The longest single belt conveyor runs from Meghalaya in India to Sylhet in Bangladesh. It is about 17 km [...]

MTR stands for Mean Time to Repair. In automated processing and packaging lines, Mean Time to Repair is the average time it takes to repair a machine once it malfunctions. It’s used to calculate how much buffering is required upstream or downstream. If your line’s longest MTR is 3 minutes, then you need at 3 [...]

We are often asked for recommended speed settings for our conveyors and accumulation tables. Here are some handy formulas to use for converting product rates to chain speeds and the frequencies of the variable frequency drives (VFDs) that power them. This formula converts products per minute (ppm) to feet per minute (fpm) for a simple [...]

We’ve been posting some more videos on YouTube lately as an alternative to the ones here on our website. Here’s a great one we just posted of our Infinity Rx vial accumulation table. It shows how we can take very unstable pharmaceutical vials and single file them to feed a filler, labeler, or inspection machine.

A typical mass flow or bi-directional table puts tremendous pressure on bottles. How do you prove that your accumulation table has no backpressure? Put a raw egg on the conveyor with a few rows of filled wine bottles and see what happens. Starring Lord William Chatterton III: The products stay in continuous motion because of [...]

One of my daughter’s favorite stories is Curious George Goes to a Chocolate Factory, a story where George’s curiosity ends up creating havoc on the packaging line. Everything works out ok in the end, but the best part is when George actually becomes the Casepacker for the line. I have a theory that George and [...]

In the 2005 Malcom Gladwell book, Blink, there is a great paragraph on marketing and packaging: there’s the issue of what is called sensation transference. This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man called Louis Cheskin, who was born in Ukraine at the turn of the century [...]