Goldie Oldies

Old doesn’t mean obsolete. Not in packaging machinery. We routinely rebuild machines from the 80’s, 70’s and earlier.

Manufacturing used to be much more stable than it is today. Technology and products evolved slowly. When someone bought a new capper or cartoner there was a good chance it would be running the same package and product 20 years later.

The classic example of this is Coca-Cola. For over 50 years there was only one “Coke” product. Coca-Cola in a 6oz returnable glass bottle. Since there was no need to run additional products, the line could be optimized to run this forever.

This meant heavy duty machinery made up of castings and forgings. It meant standardized designs where reliability and simplicity of operation and maintenance were key parameters. Flexibility? Why bother? The product would never change.

We can see this heritage in today’s machines. A Jones CMV cartoner, Resina capper or Cozzoli filler today looks and runs much the same as it did in the 50 years ago. The benefit in the plant is that after all these years and all these machines, they have been completely debugged. Whatever can go wrong has and has been fixed. The strong designs survived, the weak ones fell by the wayside.

There are some drawbacks to old machines. Safety guarding is one. Electrical and control systems are another. Fortunately, these drawbacks tend to be relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. Safety guarding is easily fabricated from 80/20 material and Lexan. PLCs are incredibly cheap and easy to program. At Frain, we usually don’t even mess with the old electronics. We find it simpler to just tear it out and start anew with PLCs, HMIs and other 21^st century controls.

Flexibility can be built into the machine using quick change parts and the addition of scales, blocks and indicators for easy and precise setting.

Old doesn’t have to mean out of date. Many of these older machines are timeless and, with proper care and some periodic upgrades, will still be running when our grandchildren have retired.

That’s why they are called goldie oldies.