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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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.
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