John Dewar & son Limited, the Scotch whisky Company of Barcardi, is investing in a new bottling and palletising system to its line 3 to increased production efficiency from its Glasgow facility.
The facility plays a key role in the distribution of brands such as “Dewars White Label”, “Dewars 12 Year Old” and “William Lawson’s Finest Blend”. The project is code named “Casino”,and after the successful operation of an existing Lita automatic case Palletiser operating for some years, Dewars looked to source a Lita bottle De- Palletiser and case Palletiser, so they chose to contact Pro Handling Solutions Ltd; the agent for Lita Srl of Turin, Italy – one of Europe’s major suppliers of Palletising and De-Palletising systems.
PHS, who is based in Worcestershire, reviewed Dewars requirements before choosing a Lita “Metro” De-Palletiser, a “Presto” Palletiser, along with an ITW Octopus 1800 BF Automatic film wrapper. This allows the operator to put a pallet of glass on the in-feed conveyor by fork lift truck, The pallet is then automatically raised to allow the operator to remove the shrink wrap, the pallet is then conveyed into the De-Palletiser.
The layer trays are automatically removed by a pneumatic robotic arm which lifts the tray and drops it in a discharge chute to be collated by the operator for recycling. The layers of bottles are swept onto the discharge table, which can run at a rate of up to 250 bottles per minute if required. The bottles are powered through 90 degrees and transferred in single file on to the line bottling conveyors. When all the layers are swept off the empty pallets are automatically stacked and removed by fork lift truck.
After bottling the filled cartons are sent by carton conveyor to a Lita Preso low level in feed automatic Palletiser. The product is selected and the Palletiser forms the layer patterns and pallet profiles and discharges the pallets onto the out feed pallet conveyor via the Octopus wrapper where they are removed by fork lift truck.
The order was placed in November 2010and the system has to go into production in May 2011. The order is a major coupe for the Worcester based Company whose main stream business is the supply of Pallet and Carton handling equipment.
Pro Handling Solutions
Geoff Hunt
Tel: 01905 723612
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