Re-Stock Your Wear Parts as Part of Your Business Spring Cleaning!
The weather is warming up and thoughts are turning to outdoor activities. For those of us in the Midwest anyway, the end of hibernation is near! As spring approaches and the temperature rises, LPS always suggests doing a check up on the in-house wear and spare parts for the production floor packaging machinery.
The most common packaging machinery parts that packagers should keep on hand are known as wear parts. Most packaging machines will have certain key parts that contact bottles, caps or other parts of the product and packaging. The contact will tend to wear these parts over time, meaning that they will need to be replaced to keep machines running efficiently.
A couple examples of wear parts would be nozzle seals on an overflow filling machine and spindle wheels on a spindle capping machine. An overflow filler achieves a level fill by diving nozzles into the bottles. The nozzle seal covers the bottle opening to allow for product to overflow from the bottle. Over time, bottle seals can wear from the pressure of the seal or even from the product being run. When seals wear, the overflow principle can be put in danger, leading to leaks or uneven fills. In the case of nozzle seals, a packager will often be able to see the wear on the seals and easily tell when replacement is needed.
Spindle wheels do the tightening of caps on the spindle capper. As the bottle and cap move through the matched sets of spindle wheels, the spinning disks contact the cap to thread it onto the bottle. Again, over time, these wheels will wear, which can lead to inconsistent tightening, loose caps or cross-threaded caps. Just like nozzle seals, the wear of the spindle wheels will usually be able to be seen with the naked eye, alerting the operator of the packaging line to the need for replacement.
Keeping these parts at the packager facility can help ward off hours or days of downtime. While LPS keeps almost all wear parts in stock, weekends, high traffic times of the year and re-stocking can cause delays. Having nozzle seals, spindle wheels and other wear parts in-house allows for a quick changeover of the wear parts and limited downtime for the packaging line.
As spring approaches and almost everyone wants to spend some long-awaited time in the sun, LPS encourages all packagers to assess their need for wear parts and readiness for replacement when necessary. The LPS Parts Department can be reached Toll Free at 1-888-393-3693 or by email at tonya@liquidpackagingsolution.com. Different machinery will obviously include different wear parts and the Parts Department can also help to identify wear parts based on the machinery in use. Keep in mind that wear parts should almost never require frequent replacement, and packagers that find themselves frequently replacing parts can contact the service department at the same number or email above for some help ensuring the correct parts and setup are being used for the project.