Yuengling Relies On CS3600HD Caseweigher From Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed
D.G. Yuengling & Son, Inc., the premium craft brewer, has experienced double-digit growth over the past five years, which has prompted them to scrutinize production efficiencies, and search for improvements. In February 2007, Yuengling installed a rugged CS3600HD Caseweigher from Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed to weigh kegs as they come off the filling line at their Mill Creek facility in Pottsville, PA.
"In the brewing industry, if your technology isn't continuously reliable, your competition will swallow you up," says Joe Frinzi, Manager of Quality and Operations at Yuengling. "The Caseweigher is rugged enough to handle the heavy weight of our kegs, and the Hi-Speed engineers were willing to customize it to fit the small space we had available on our line."
The CS3600HD Caseweigher is designed specifically to handle exceptionally heavy products and tough industrial environments like Yuengling's. Rugged construction, a stainless steel frame, and an Intralox® 400-series plastic belt allow the Caseweigher to easily withstand the constant impact of heavy packages. Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed customized the CS3600HD Caseweigher to fit into the tight space on Yuengling's production line, only 24 inches long and 18 inches wide.
"A half-barrel keg weighs 160 lbs. When you are transferring 330 of those an hour, the machines that handle them have to be robust," noted Frinzi. "Hi-Speed's Caseweigher was heavier than we expected, totally accurate, and much more stable than what we used previously. The keg transfer is so smooth you hardly notice it."
The continuous motion CS3600HD Caseweigher weighs large packages up to 30 inches wide and between 44 pounds and 250 pounds, such as kegs, pails, totes, boxes, cartons, cases, bags, and sacks. Stainless steel, hermetically sealed load cells withstand normal operational conditions such as heavy cleaning regiments commonly seen in food and beverage environments. An extensive array of accessories including in-feed and discharge conveyors, rejectors, and sensors for open flaps can be provided with the system.
An open design provides convenient side access to all major electrical and mechanical components for easy inspection, cleaning, and maintenance, while the belt design makes tracking, tensioning, and belt replacement fast and simple, which leads to maximum machine uptime. Combined with Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed's new XE series controller, the CS3600HD Caseweigher delivers ease of use for superior performance when weighing heavy products.
"We've only got two guys working our line. It's entirely automated. The user interface on the XE series controller allows our operators to see what the Caseweigher is doing from almost anywhere on the floor. Reports are easy to generate, changeovers are quick, and we can identify and fix a filling problem faster," says Frinzi. "Our operators call the Caseweigher the Rolls Royce of checkweighers. The best thing about the Hi-Speed Caseweigher is that we don't have to worry about it all the time. It just works perfectly."
SOURCE: Mettler-Toledo Hi-Speed