i was watching How It’s made, and there was a dedicated machine for a particular part of the product something as little as a proprietary bottle cap. and it was a huge machine. Who got the time to sit and invent the machine for that little piece. think of the variety of such designs, so does that mean you need a different new machine for any other special design?
also machines that make machines like robot machines making robot machines.
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Engineer here. We design these machines, we’ve got the time to do it because it’s our job.
It makes sense for the company to employ us to do this because of scale. 1 or 2 things being made, it’s probably faster and cheaper to do it by hand. Thousands or millions of these being made, you’re going to want a machine that makes it.
>does that mean you need a different new machine for any other special design?
Yes, kinda. Many machines share 95% of their design, concepts, etc with other existing machines. So we usually start with a bunch of the work already done.
you say ‘proprietary’, but if you think about it, there’s only really 5 factors in it.
the diameter and the height of the cap. This is just about changing the various feeding channels for the caps, and the ‘head’ of the cap screwing machine.
the other three are the screwing actions – the direction of the screwing, how many turns (or until a certain amount of resistance is given meaning its ‘tight’) and the vertical height change of the screwing. All these 3 things area easily adjusted on the machine.
And remember ‘properitary’ just means ‘only for them’ – the top of a coke bottle is proprietary, as is the top on a sprite, and a Dr Pepper. they’re all basically the same, but also different (you’d find a sprite top on a coke bottle very wrong, for instance).
Also, ‘How its made’ is the ultimate in cheap TV. it’s one cameraman, and usually the segment director who will also take notes for the voiceover guy to say later. They’ll say things like ‘proprietary machine’ just to spice it up, because there’s only so many times you can say ‘a machine’.
Also, most machines are far more flexible than you might think. When I was in university, I’d work evenings on a line in a condiments factory. The line I worked on would change its product daily (it was an overflow and small-run line), we’d just get whatever the kitchen area dumped into our hopper, and manually load containers in, and manually stack the pallets at the far end. We did everything on that one machine from quart-size tubs of hot chocolate fudge sauce , to the gallon refils of horseradish to 5-gallon buckets of Mayo. The engineer would just adjust the pneumatics for the injection nozzle for quantity, the lid roller height, and the ink-dropper location (to print the expiry dates on – most people dont’ know that they’re just a little line of jets that drop the ink 1-2 inches from the container, like a dot matric printer as it passes underneith). Most machines in such plants are generic. where bits need to be specific, they can either negotiate with the manufacturer at the time, to get it delivered as needed, or their in-house engineers may make their own changes later.
Process engineer here. As others have said most of those “specialized” machines are just Frankenstein’d versions of other machines.
I work for a medical supply company, when I design a machine for production the first thing I go look for is something similar we have done in the past. This gives me a basis and will usually have very good input from the operator on what works and what doesn’t work. We can then take sub assembly ideas from other machines and put them altogether to make something new.
When staring at a big machine it is all very daunting, once you dig deeper into it you see that there are only a few different methods of mechanical movement doing all the work. It kinda ruins the “magic” of how things work. Most of the time it’s oh they just used a pneumatic(or electric) actuator to move this.
For the majority of engineers it’s not completely designing and inventing every part from scratch it’s figuring out a way to manipulate an existing design to do what you want it to.
Tool and die manufacture! A lot of the time it’s a standard machine with custom tooling to make some specific things, like an injection molding machine that’s the same whether you’re making bottle caps or computer cases, just with a different mold. How much you have to make custom depends on how difficult the part is to manufacture, but engineers designing something for mass production will know that and generally try to design things that can use more off-the-shelf manufacturing equipment.
The “proprietary” part is often not the whole machine. Most manufacturing machines share 75-95% functional commonality with their cousins in the same type of manufacture. It’s the last 5-25% of the process that makes a machine ‘proprietary’.
Using the example of bottle caps, most modern bottle cap making machines are identical in terms of gross function (obviously metal cap machines and plastic cap machines are different but we’re talking about equivalent machines between competing brands), it is the specific dimensions of the finished product that are different. Heck I’m pretty sure even Pepsi and Coke stopped using different thread counts for their plastic bottles in the mid-2000s.
For the bottle caps specifically, alot of the equipment will be tools that fit in bigger generic tools like a press.
For example, I used to work in plastic injection moulding, and you could have one press, and lots of moulds that fit in it to make various components, it’s not so much a new machine for everything new, more what tooling can we design that fits our current capabilities that works.
This is the exact job of Industrial Engineers and what they spend 4ish years learning to do well. They are trained to determine the best way to manufacture that bottle cap as well as the best way to make the machine that makes the bottle cap. Cause it’s they’re job there really good at the fine details like making the machine as reusable as possible. So if the cap design changes the whole machine can be reused for it. This is heavily part of their job and also why it is it’s own job! I bet a bunch of types of engineers can make a machine that makes that bottle cap, but make a machine that’s cost efficient, repairable, reusable, and the most optimized it can be without sacrificing bottle cap quality? Leave it to the industrial engineers
TLDR: google industrial engineering
These machines are expensive, but usually designed to last. The cost of bespoke designs is spread over a huge number of products.
The machines can also be adjustable to do different designs – so for instance a machine to make a bottle cap might make different bottle caps with a change of mould or head. This allows using one machine to make different bottle caps to reduce downtime (because you want to run your factory at as high capacity as possible to spread out your fixed costs) and reduces engineering costs on duplicating designs.
Example of how a seemingly large cost of machines is actually pretty small:
If a machine makes 20 a minute (very slow), that’s 20 million a year. If they last only 10 years (short time), that’s 200 million bottle caps total
If you spend $200,000 on the machine, that’s 1/10 of a cent per bottle cap on the machine, and that is with very conservative numbers for speed and lifetime of the machine.
There are machine shops that make those customized machines. I work for a supplier on-site at one of them!
I used to work in a plastic molding factory, way back in the day.
The machine is huge, but the actual mold is relatively small and can be changed pretty easily to make different shaped things. It’s not like they need to make a new machine
So if a company needs custom bottle caps, they hire a plastic molding company. The plastic company just makes a custom mold, installs it in the molding machine, and makes a batch of bottle caps. The whole production run may only take a week.
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