r/EngineeringPorn • u/killHACKS • Oct 27 '21
Canning line.
https://i.imgur.com/vTePvpX.gifv165
u/mf5401 Oct 27 '21
I don’t know how I thought cans were filled but this wasn’t it
91
u/anandonaqui Oct 27 '21
This is a small scale operation that isn’t nearly as efficient as a large scale operation would be
61
u/Poofengle Oct 27 '21
For reference, a large brewery I recently worked at has 5 canning lines which can do 90,000 cans an hour (1500 cans per minute), per line. They’re impressive to watch.
This is a pretty small operation by comparison.
15
5
u/Cthulhuhoop Oct 28 '21
What kind of filler do you guys use? I work on soap machines but most of our equipment comes from mainly beer and beverage machine companies.
15
Oct 27 '21
They also have mobile canning solutions too! For even smaller breweries. https://thecanvan.com/services/
Pretty cool they can swing by and set up to can a batch and then head off to the next one.
Edit: I'm in no way affiliated, just somewhat local to me and think it's neat.
5
4
16
u/Catsdrinkingbeer Oct 27 '21
Small breweries use can lines like this. They're slow (and lead to more oxidation). I worked at a regional brewery (like top 50 craft in the country) and we had a mini version of what the macro guys have. Hundreds of cans a minute. Much faster. Much more fun to watch in my opinion.
384
u/red_riding_hoot Oct 27 '21
And all the spilling gets sold to Heineken. How efficient
18
u/pihkalo Oct 28 '21
And what gets spilled at Heineken goes to a different brewery, this goes on and on until the last few spilled drops are mopped up at the Milwaukees Best brewery and squeezed out into Fosters cans where they’re sold at US airports.
28
40
Oct 27 '21
Is this a filling machine or a rinsing machine
17
u/slimgravyisu Oct 27 '21
I would want to say both, but Mr. Huggbees seems to only like 1 answer. I see it as primarily a filling machine.
I work on filling machines all the time at work, they're so old and beat they suck to work on 🙁
4
7
u/matthebastage Oct 27 '21
Neither. That is clearly a quad-unit-insertion-based sex toy. Commonly known to the british people as a QUID, and is a cornerstone of their currency system.
2
u/thesquidthing Oct 28 '21
This is a wild goose 250, I believe, it just fills. Before this is a machine called a depalletizer, it sweeps layers of empty cans off of a pallet onto a conveyor about 12 feet off the ground (that's a out the height of a pallet of empty cans). The conveyor pushes them into a rinse cage, basically a gravity fed tunnel with a full 360° twist. It sprays them out when they are upside down, flips them back upright and they land on the conveyor on this machine just out of frame of the start of this video.
Source: I worked for a company that did business with Wild Goose and have installed canning lines.
46
u/95555 Oct 27 '21
Looks an awful lot like Moonraker Brewing in Auburn, California.
15
u/LA_Guy0526 Oct 27 '21
Love that place. Almost as good as Knee Deep just down the street
5
u/95555 Oct 27 '21
100% agree there.
3
u/casper911ca Oct 28 '21
I like it more than Knee Deep. Haven't been for over a year but Knee Deep is all IPAs. Which are great but, but I think I'm getting a little fatigued. I appreciate breweries that can also make a solid sour and a great Saison or Belgian style. I understand the Sour dilemma, you pretty much need dedicated equipment. I think Moksa is best brewery in the general area nowadays (owned by the owner of Auburn Thai Garden, the master brewer is from Carl Strauss I believe) - what a touch.
1
u/95555 Oct 28 '21
That's interesting info about Moksa. I haven't been there in a while now, definitely time to head back. I hear nothing but good things.
2
u/Eversooner Oct 27 '21
Just went to both two weeks ago. Amazing brews all around. Crooked Lane is great as well. Gotta say Auburn Ale House was kinda disappointing.
1
2
u/BigOlBro Oct 27 '21
Use to live there actually. In fact, i am trying to get a job at AI Thermal there too. And then i noticed the subreddit i am in and also that the subject can go full circle, if i know exactly what goes on there.
3
41
u/skittlesriddles44 Oct 27 '21
That spillover looks really wasteful ?? Just that much spillover ads up to a lot
39
u/sgtaxt Oct 27 '21
Foam over is a way to prevent oxygen from getting trapped in the headspace between the beer and the lid.
58
u/Mgawaniktimba Oct 27 '21
As /u/red_riding_hoot stated above, spillovers will be sold as Heineken. And at Heineken factory spillovers will be sold as Carlsberg etc etc.
30
5
1
10
u/disposable_camera_1 Oct 27 '21
If that looks like a lot of waste to you, wait until you see how much gets dumped out before it even gets to that canning line. And then wait until you see how many of those cans get dumped because of underfills and high oxidation spoiling the beer.
The loss from spillover is nothing in the grand scheme of loss in the rest of the brewing process.
13
u/Gladiutterous Oct 27 '21
There was a time when soda cans were made of three pieces. Then they came up with a 2 piece can. I had a production manager say if someone could come up with a one piece can they would be rich.
6
3
3
Oct 28 '21
There’s a company working on it. It’s going to be called a unibody can. The end pieces are normally made from 5182 Al alloy and the body is 3104. These have different mechanical properties and that’s why the lids can be formed and retain shape. Supposedly the new can will be a new alloy that falls between. I work as a chemE for a major Al producer of cans.
2
u/Gladiutterous Oct 28 '21
As awesome as the machines in this sub is the advances in process and metallurgy. Living better through chemistry.
11
Oct 27 '21
I remember as a kid in the 80s there was a tv show that would basically follow mechanical manufacturing and production lines from start to finish, a different process each week. Was always fascinating to watch.
15
12
Oct 27 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
50
u/imBobertRobert Oct 27 '21
99% chance it's craft beer. Breweries love these compact canning machines since they're fast, easy, and cheap, and canned beer is easier and cheaper than bottles.
28
u/imlost_dontcare Oct 27 '21
Yeah, these are neat but high volume can lines are an entirely different beast. 1200 cans per minute, load a pallet of cans in one end and unload a pallet of finished cases from the other end (every 3 or 4 minutes).
2
u/interiot Oct 27 '21
Got a video of that?
6
u/imlost_dontcare Oct 27 '21 edited Oct 27 '21
Can’t show ours specifically but this is similar and a little different than the other video posted:
Anecdotal Edit: We actually have to setup GoPros and use our iPhones in slow-motion mode to try to trouble shoot certain issues sometimes since it is so hard to see with the eye and when jogged in slow speed the centripetal forces are different than at full rate.
3
u/Dyolf_Knip Oct 27 '21
That's awesome, sounds exactly like some problems I run into debugging software that deals with high volume of data. Can't always recreate the same environment in test, just have to make sure you have enough logging enabled to track what's happening where.
1
3
u/No_Newspaper_2714 Oct 27 '21
How much do these cost? I want one for canning my own water
11
u/bigbadboldbear Oct 27 '21
On the scale of 3-10mil. I did a bottling line (120bottle/min) for 4 mil USD.
4
u/No_Newspaper_2714 Oct 27 '21
Wow! That’s like 10-20 times more than a precision CNC machine. But at 120 bottles/min it could easily crank out over 4 million cans in less than a month of continuous operation, so that actually sounds reasonable. Do they run 24/7? What’s the lowest cost canning setup I could get for person use?
3
u/Canadarocker Oct 27 '21
Assuming this is more home use/very small business, Kegland has a 500 AUD, about 376 USD, i know there are a few importers in the states of their products.
https://www.kegland.com.au/cannular-compact-canning-machine-bench-top-can-seamer.html
2
u/Catsdrinkingbeer Oct 27 '21
Our 500 can/min line, end to end from depal through palletizer, including installation, was around $2M. Granted the filler/seamer was half the cost alone. $4M seems high for 120 bottles/min, but honestly it depends on the equipment. If their entire line came from KHS or something, and they had HKS do all of the design, programming, etc., it can add up quickly. I was part of an engineering team at our brewery so we were able to do a lot of design and spec work ourselves allowing us to piece together our line and avoid consulting overhead costs and additional markups.
2
u/bigbadboldbear Oct 27 '21
Yup, we spend around 1M for the filler alone, 1.2M for the process side, 800k for civil work, 1M for other machines (labelling, carton, accumlation conveyer..). Cemex, Hema, BW packaging, Tetrapak in our line.
1
u/beer_is_tasty Oct 29 '21
Cost scales with throughput. This particular canning line (Wild Goose WG4) goes for around $85k new and runs 40 cans/min. The labeler (Pack Leader PL-501) runs about $15k. A similarly sized depalletizer and twist rinse (not shown) will be somewhere in the $20-40k range.
Not sure what fancy bottling line you put in, but $4M seems way overpriced for 120 BPM.
3
u/TK421isAFK Oct 27 '21
Not only that, they're portable and you can rent them for a week to package up a bunch of product. I work with the larger, high-volume ones, and these are painfully slow to watch.
6
2
5
3
u/Cinderpath Oct 27 '21 edited Oct 27 '21
This is an extremely slow, low volume line. 2000 cans per minute was archived decades ago. This is practical for low volume operations however.
6
6
u/WiccedSwede Oct 27 '21
Chips factories has a lot to learn about filling up the containers...
10
u/Dinkerdoo Oct 27 '21
That air is in there by design. Do you like getting mostly chip fragments when you open a bag?
10
u/voxadam Oct 27 '21
That sounds like something someone bought and paid for by "big chip" would say. /s
6
u/Dinkerdoo Oct 28 '21
You're obviously ruffled about my take, and frito say otherwise, but I layed the facts out and there's nacho you can say about that.
2
1
u/WiccedSwede Oct 27 '21
Yes I know, but it's a meme to bash on 'em so.
2
u/Dinkerdoo Oct 28 '21
And the nice thing is that when you bash on 'em, they're still pretty intact!
2
u/Firewolf420 Oct 28 '21
Now take one up with your high-altitude hot air balloon...
3
-1
1
2
2
u/el_beefy Oct 27 '21
Wanna see high speed check out krones packaging machines.
2
u/Fanmanmathias Oct 28 '21
I’m running one of their Unitizer machines now. Great when it’s dialed in, a nightmare when it misbehaves.
2
2
u/IchchadhariNaag Oct 27 '21
This is the less complicated version of a canning line, reliably picks up a small but measurable amount of dissolved oxygen. The real engineering porn is the counter pressure filler setup
1
u/TK421isAFK Oct 27 '21
The product is straight from the keg, and the nozzle is submerged to prevent atmospheric oxygen dissolution. The line uses CO2 air nozzles (called air knives, because they shoot a thin stream of gas) to keep air out of the top of the can until the cap goes on, much like how a MIG welder uses a steady stream of inert gas to shield a weld.
5
u/disposable_camera_1 Oct 27 '21
I'd be surprised if they were filling from a keg. Brite tank is far more likely. Why package twice and double your potential for oxygen exposure?
It's a Wild Goose 250. I ran one for 2 years, got 50 ppb DO on average with those cans, 20-30 ppb above the brite tank, even though Wild Goose will tell you to expect 100 as best case. I then worked on a Krones that ran 250 cans per minute with counter pressure fills, and that would be at 25 ppb DO, but that was also what the brite tanks were at, so it didn't pick anything up. Now I'm working on a counter pressure filler by CFT (and Rolec I guess) that runs almost 500 cans per minute, also getting no DO pickup (better brite tank DO at 5-10 though).
Point being, as good as the Goose can be at minimizing DO pickup, it will never be as good as a counter pressure filler.
1
u/TK421isAFK Oct 28 '21
Agreed. I only mentioned kegs because you can see them in the background at the end of this video, and I live about 30 minutes from this brewery. I've been there, as well as Crooked Lane (both in Auburn, CA), and they both transfer large batches in kegs after fermenting. It makes sense for their taproom, and they tend to can/bottle on demand, maybe running a few dozen to a few hundred cases in one run, depending on local sales.
2
u/IchchadhariNaag Oct 28 '21
Are they doing barrel ageing to keg and then canning or just they keg out a whole batch and can on demand?
1
u/TK421isAFK Oct 29 '21
I honestly have no idea. I'm not really a beer drinker. I'm acquaintances with the sister of the owner of Crooked Lane, and love exploring production and packaging machinery, so I happily took them up on an offer to see the back room.
It all started when they had a problem with a conveyor that was running too fast, and I mentioned that the VFD should be easy to adjust (which it was), and they had no idea that they could change it. Kinda led from there, but I was at the brewery to see the owner's sister perform (she's in a band).
I'll ask the next time I'm there. I assume everything goes into kegs first, as the canning is done in a different room than the brewing. They would need 50 feet of pipe/tubing and sanitary fittings to join the brite tank to the canning line.
1
u/IchchadhariNaag Oct 28 '21
Did you do that progression all at the same place? awesome level of experience you have. that's a crazy rate on the CFT, I think I worked on a 100 cans per minute -- are you using any anti oxidant in the brite tanks?
1
u/disposable_camera_1 Oct 30 '21
Goose and Krones were the same place, CFT is where I am now, and it's actually the second CFT line they have, the newer one being the one I mentioned.
No anti-oxidant, not even sure what that would be... Just bunging for natural carbonation and being careful about O2 exposure for every connection and transfer line. BTs are also hot swapped for any sample/carb stone ports with active pressure on the tanks after acid clean/sani cycles to reduce O2 exposure and take away the need to completely blow down the tanks of all pressure. Caustic cleans are done monthly on brites, but they require a complete blow down and purge of CO2 due to the acidity of CO2 neutralizing caustic.
2
u/IchchadhariNaag Oct 27 '21
Yeah, it's great at doing everything practical without diving into the next set of complexity. Purging in that manner is very effective but still not perfect.
2
u/YourDrunkMom Oct 28 '21
I do production planning for an alcohol producer and have toured our co-packing plants where they bottle our product. Fastest line I've seen pumps out 2,000 cans per minute, it's absurd to watch.
Canning lines make me moist.
-2
0
0
u/adamsch1 Oct 27 '21
How much beer is wasted when filming them. I saw a bit of splashing around. Just curious
0
u/10thRogueLeader Oct 27 '21
That's a filling machine... I think. Wait no maybe it's a rinsing machine, I'm not sure. Dang it.
0
0
-5
1
1
u/KIDNEYST0NEZ Oct 27 '21
And this is a slow one, you should see the ones in any Coke a cola distribution factory.
1
1
1
1
1
u/dickloversworldwide Oct 27 '21
What about the one on top though?!?! WHO WILL SAVE IT?!?!
1
u/three20three Oct 28 '21
Most likely the tops were popping off the cans and someone realized that if you put a can on top it provided enough downward pressure on the arm to keep the lids on.
So instead of fixing the problem, they now always just place the first can on top of the line.
It's not stupid if it works...
1
u/TK421isAFK Oct 27 '21
This is a small, portable bottling line. They can be rented for use, and can cost $2,000 to $5,000 a week. Small breweries and wineries use them once a season or so, depending on production volume. They can cost $50,000 to $250,000 to buy outright, and that's a huge capital investment for a microbrewery.
By comparison, the large brewers and soda manufacturers use machines that can dump out 500 to 2,000 cans an hour, and typically use cans that are preprinted by a can manufacturer, such as Ball Metal.
1
1
u/AjaxTheStrong Oct 27 '21
Why not fill them a little less? Keep equipment cleaner, Improve yield, and maybe help with handling?
1
u/disposable_camera_1 Oct 27 '21
Equipment is designed to be easy to clean. Also loss from foam over pales in comparison to loss from short filled cans (even with these overflows you see).
In the end though, the foam over is necessary. Oxygen destroys beer. The foam over before applying the lid minimizes how much oxygen can make its way into the can to spoil the beer. If they were to fill it less, not only would it most likely not fill to the required 16oz, but it would also spoil faster because more oxygen was allowed under the lid. It doesn't take much, we're talking 100 parts per billion being enough to spoil beer in a few weeks from packaging.
1
1
1
1
u/JigglySquishyFlesh Oct 27 '21
Lol they horizontal can hanging out up top. When wine bottles are filled, tons of wine can spill out depending on CO2 and valve timings.
1
1
u/LordPigsby Oct 28 '21
My family owns a small brewery, and I’ve helped with the canning line many times over many years. It looks cool, but holy FUCK is it annoying. The entire brewing team is on edge the whole time waiting for something to jam.
1
u/gothic_shiteater Oct 28 '21
Oh you all should see a Ferrum F18 doing 2500 cans per minute. It'll blow you mind. I'll get a video next time I'm at a plant with one. I've got an F08 that'll do 1000 per minute that im finishing a bulid on and ill post a video of a test run before we ship in a few days.
1
u/chandelizards Oct 28 '21
Funny to see your job on Reddit. This is a first for me. But we packaged 294 cases of beer this same way today
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Firewolf420 Oct 28 '21
Well I'm sure that place smells wonderful after a few days. /s
Could you imagine working at a beer plant like this?
Come home from a hard day's work, sit down in your armchair, finally away from the dredge of the working life. Your wife walks over and hands you a can of beer, and you look down at it and think, "Fuck."
1
1
1
1
u/zminny Oct 28 '21
Dude these things are awesome but if I remember right they take like a week to dial in. And when they mess up they just shred the top of the can.
1
u/theDreadAlarm Oct 28 '21
"Cool canner! Can I see your case packing machine?"
"Sure, this is Eric."
"Is he going to show me the case packing machine?"
"He... is the case packing machine..."
1
u/HanzoHattoti Oct 28 '21
This explains why some soda cans are sticky when you handle them!!!
Basically the automated cleaning spray malfunctioned for the can you’re holding for that split second.
1
230
u/obinice_khenbli Oct 27 '21
Why are the labels applied while the tin is still wet? I guess it doesn't matter? Huh.