Teamwork Displayed for Gas Meter Paint Finishing System Finishing system manufacturer and conveyor specialist work together to deliver innovative paint finishing solutions. Pacline Conveyors has many years of experience working with paint finishing companies to improve their productivity through automation. Elite Air Systems specializes in manufacturing all types of high quality spray finishing systems, including spray booths, conveyor automated finishing systems, industrial paint kitchens, bake ovens and air make-up units. Mike Regalado from Elite Air Systems and Robert D’Alesio from Pacline Conveyors have been working together on paint finishing applications for some time now and have developed a good working relationship. Mike has extensive knowledge of the paint-finishing world and calls on the experts at Pacline Conveyors to provide the best conveyor options for their individual customer needs. Recently, Mike had a new project with his customer Angelo Radelja at Romet Ltd. Romet manufactures and supplies rotary gas meters and related instruments to gas utilities and customers around the world. Romet needed a new gas meter paint finishing system that would increase production capacity of their smaller sized gas meters. Mike quickly contacted PACLINE to provide the conveyor design and equipment for this application. Robert worked closely with both Angelo and Mike to come up with an efficient layout and drawing within the allowable space. Prototype for custom part carrier developed by PACLINE Angelo’s idea to increase the production rate for his gas meters involved a new carrier that would to double the product carrying capacity. Since Angelo had little time or resources to dedicate to this, Robert at PACLINE took on the task of designing the carrier...
Why Garment Conveyor Safety is Important Safety in the workplace is more than a slogan. It’s a mantra sung by businesses all over the world in an effort to protect workers and prevent rising health insurance costs and sometimes fatal lawsuits. Accidents happen and seem to do so at the most inopportune times. Mishaps can pop up involving new and old equipment. With new equipment it’s often due to bad manufacturing and installation; with old equipment, it’s a result of wear and tear that was not recognized and the lack of a stop-gap measure as a precaution against an accident. There are two specific safety issues here to discuss: When standard manufacturing without safeguards causes harm; and, When there’s equipment failure by design. Let’s address these in order and why garment conveyor safety is important. First, do your garment storage conveyors meet USA OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) regulations? Garment Conveyors? OSHA Regs? Really? Sure thing! On any machine where there are moving parts within reach of humans who interact with the machine, there must be safety precautions to prevent injury. https://www.osha.gov/machine-guarding Case in point: order storage conveyor, the inmate property storage system, and the hotel/casino employee uniform storage and retrieval conveyors. There are two types of conveyors in this industry: open sprocket drive systems with yokes and enclosed track systems. The majority of these conveyors in the United States use idler and drive sprockets on ends and corners of the conveyors along with a “chain” which is suspended from a “track” with “yokes” and wheels. Before we go any further, a few definitions: Slotted Racks: This is...
16 Step Guide for Preparing an Overhead Conveyor Layout After a thorough analysis of your requirements, PACLINE prepares detailed overhead conveyor layout drawings for your approval. However, should you wish to prepare your own overhead conveyor layout drawing, please use the following as a guideline: 1. Locate overhead conveyor path. Keep parallel conveyor paths as close as possible to simplify installation. 2. Locate equipment, workstations, aisles, columns, walls, load and unload areas, etc. 3. Make a material flow diagram indicating the quantity of material to be handled per minute or hour. 4. Determine the most convenient weight and/or the number of pieces to be handled per carrier to establish tentative carrier size and shape. 5. Determine the number of carriers per minute or hour. 6. Determine the method of attaching overhead conveyors or supports to your building. 7. Determine the maximum incline angle for vertical curves. 8. Select horizontal curve radius. (Curves 24” radius or larger will reduce chain pull) 9. Verify all clearances, both horizontal and vertical. 10. Select tentative track elevations with respect to the bottom of the track. 11. Draw overhead conveyor layout to the largest possible scale. Indicate north direction. 12. Allow a minimum of 8” straight between tangent and vertical and/or horizontal bends. 13. Calculate total chain length. For calculation of chain length on horizontal plane, compute straight dimensions to include all curves. For chain length calculation in vertical inclines, refer to elevation change charts. 14. Always position your drive at the highest elevation to pull the load. 15. Always position the take-up at a low point directly after the drive and avoid curves...
Learn About Uniform Conveyor ROI for Your Operations Economical gas mileage is an enticement to buy a hybrid. Getting 50 miles per gallon is attractive. However, while the hybrid looks good on fuel, the return on investment is simple sticker shock, here’s the math. At 50 miles and $2.50 per gallon, the annual fuel cost for the hybrid—at 15,000 miles a year—is $750. For a car that averages 25 miles per gallon, the annual cost of gas is $1,500 a year. It makes sense to buy the hybrid. However, hybrid cars are expensive and can sell for $15,000 more than the same non-hybrid model. At that difference, it will take 20 years to recover the hybrid, not a very good Return on Investment (ROI) to help the environment. For business, an ROI for capital purchases of 2-3 years makes a lot of sense. With manufacturing and operating automation used to decrease labor costs, determining the uniform conveyor’s ROI is relatively easy. The operation of a hotel uniform distribution room may need to serve 800 employees who pick up and drop off uniforms on a periodical basis. Assume the room that stores and distributes the uniforms is open six days a week, 16 hours a day or 112 hours a week. There’s a room supervisor, one or more seamstresses and other staff to meet and greet employees. There could be as many as six employees in the room. At an average rate including all benefits of $14 an hour, that’s an annual operating budget of $175,000 a year. Through automation, the staff could be reduced to 10 hours a day,...
Pacline Conveyors Inc. awarded Inmate Property Storage System for $100 Million Jail Project in Harris County, Texas. Pacline Conveyors Inc., was recently awarded the contract to build and install the inmate property storage system for the new Harris County Joint Processing Center in Houston, Texas. The $100 million dollar, 250,000 square-foot facility will serve the third largest county jail system in the United States and is expected to be completed by the end of 2017. The new Joint Processing Center has been designed to improve efficiency in the correctional system by consolidating and streamlining all inmate bookings and releases for the city of Houston and the county. The Harris County Center will have the capacity to hold up to 1,500 inmates at various stages of processing. Managing the inmate property for a facility of this size is a challenge and an important reason why the builder, Clark Construction, chose PACLINE’s automated garment storage and retrieval system for the Harris County Joint Processing Center. The PACLINE system will include 12 industrial-strength PAC-LINE™ signature enclosed track conveyor loops with the capacity to carry a total of 12,000 hanging garment bags with inmate personal property. PACLINE’s RETRIEVER™ control system will allow operators the efficiency of retrieving multiple indexed bags. This is an important feature of the system as it is estimated that the Harris County Center will be processing up to 900 inmates per day. The enclosed-track design of PACLINE’s conveyor system eliminates dangerous pinch points common in other conveyor systems. This is an extremely important consideration for inmate property systems where hands and fingers of the operators can come in contact...
