Before we built our own Semi-automatic Depalletizer we found ourselves asking the question “What is a Semi-automatic depalletizer and why would we need one?” Well, as it turns out it’s not a employee title, but a machine. A very helpful one too.
Let’s go back to when we found out what a Semi-automatic depalletizer was and why we needed one. We started canning our beers by hand with our “depalletizer” Danny carrying each and every can by hand to the filling station. He did a nice job, but there had to be a way to make things easier for poor Danny. So we went in search of a solution and found out there is a machine that can load cans from a pallet into the canning line all by itself. That was exactly what we needed, but it wasn’t as if we could order one online, wait a day and have it delivered. In fact, there where more problems than just the delivery. For starters finding a depalletizer was quite a task by itself. Finding the right one for us was pretty much impossible.
ENGINEERING
That’s when we decided we would built our own. We had a degree in engineering, tools and multiple sets of right hands, so how hard could it be? Turns out, not that hard. We only needed three test versions to find the perfect one. Version 3.0 of our very own Zomerdijk Engineer Semi-automatic Can Depalletizer is now running at our brewery and at others on a weekly basis, and we’re in love with the thing every time we use it. Why? We’ll tell you why. Let’s start with poor Danny and his carrying every can from the pallet to the canning line. He’s not so poor anymore and isn’t even working on the canning line anymore. What’s he’s doing now? We don’t know. Probably drinking some of our beers in a dark corner of the brewery. But back to our love for the can depalletizer. The thing makes life for us so much easier since it’s a breeze loading a whole layer of cans onto it. You only have to slide it onto the loader, lift the back up and start the vibrations (the front of the machine vibrates so the cans slide down without tipping over). The cans will make their way into the twist rinser (which we also made in house), have a clean and roll into the filling station. We only check every ten minutes if the loader is in need of some fresh cans. If so, it takes but a minute to fill it with a fresh batch. Having a full time employee on carrying cans isn’t needed any more.
SAVES SO MUCH TIME
But our love for the semi-automatic can depalletizer goes beyond the machine itself, because it saves us so much time along the way. With the cans being loaded at great volumes it gives the operator time to check other things. In our case we can check the quality of the beers (CO2, DO, weight and seams of the cans) throughout the canning process. If something goes wrong we get the chance to fix it faster than we where able to before our creation was put to work at the beginning of the canning line.
