Four Simple Steps to the Right Capping Machine

Obviously, if you are a packager, choosing the right packaging equipment for your product is very important.  Many packagers will look to packaging machine manufacturers for assistance in making such decisions.  Therefore, it is just as important for us, as a packaging machinery manufacturer, to choose the right packaging equipment for our customers.  For capping equipment, there are four basic steps to choosing the right equipment.  Of course, each project may include special steps or questions to answer, but these basic four will always lead the packager to one or several ideal capping machines.

 

 

While most people might think the first question to be answered is what type of cap will be used, it is better to back up a step and start with the bottle or other container.  Choosing a package will most likely limit the type of cap or caps that can be used on the project.  For example, a rectanglular, open topped container for berries, ice cream or other products will likely not use a screw cap, removing spindle cappers and chuck cappers from the mix and pointing toward a snap capping machine.  Some plastic or glass bottles may be available in styles that will use screw caps or snap caps.  In this way, looking first at the package to be used can narrow the capping machine options for the packager.

 

 

Once the package is chosen, there may still exist a number of options for the type of cap that can be used.  Even if a bottle or a container can only use a screw cap, there still exist many different options for the cap to be used, each of which can influence the choice of capping machine.  Will the screw cap be a simple flat cap that can be handled easily by a chuck capping machine?  Will it use a pump sprayer type screw cap that may be more easily handled by a spindle capper?  Or maybe the container uses a unique type of trigger sprayer that will require custom capping machinery?  Choosing your cap will continue to narrow down the choices and likely point to the correct type of capping machine for your project.  However, a couple more questions can be answered to fine tune the type of capping machine to be used.

 

 

This is a pretty simple and straight forward question.  If you are capping a hundred bottles a day, automatic capping machinery is probably overkill for your project, though not in all cases, as noted below.  If you are capping tens of thousands of bottles per day, a manual handheld chuck capper is not the right choice.  Look at your current production levels and choose the level of automation for your capping machine based on the number of bottles or containers that you need to produce each day.

 

 

Capping machinery is available in several different levels of automation, including manual, semi-automatic and automatic packaging machinery.  The final basic question that should be answered is where do we see our production levels in the future?  While semi-automatic machinery may work for current production levels, a company that has reason to expect growth in the near future may opt for an automatic capping machine right from the start, knowing that the packaging equipment will work not only with current demands, but future demands as well. 

 

 

Again, there will likely exist other considerations, budget being an obvious one.  But these four simple questions will help identify the ideal capping machine for any given packaging line.  For more information on capping machines, or any of the packaging equipment manufactured by Liquid Packaging Solutions, browse our website or call our offices to speak with a Packaging Specialist!