Razor Blade Cartridge Project

Razor blades come in bulk and the customer wanted a solution to automatically take the razor blades out of the bulk case and load them into an automatic cartoner. AFA Systems designed a bulk case handling system that accepted bulk cases, picked the razor blades out of the case, formatted them into the correct pack pattern, and then cartoned them at 150 cartons per minute. Also, the razor blade cartridges had three different pack patterns including on-edge, lay-flat and stacked.

Wet Wipes Project

AFA Systems designed a custom cartoner that accepted tubs from an extruding line. AFA handled the tubs from an overhead conveyor and automatically loaded them into a vertical magazine, lying on their side. The magazine feeds the tubs into a specially designed lug continuous conveyor and delivered the tubs to the loading station. The buckets to accept the wet wipes had an engineered rolling system under the buckets to ensure the wet wipe rolls were constantly rolling. This process had to be used since the roll ends were not glue tacked. After, a barrel cam loading system end loaded the wet wipe rolls into the open tubs.

Dryer Sheet Project

Another special project was handling dryer sheets at speeds of 150 stacks of dryer sheets per minute. AFA designed a special five (5) servo speed-up conveyor to ensure a consistent gap of dryer sheets before entering the specially designed buckets on the servo-pack collating conveyor. The buckets are designed to ensure the dryer sheet stacks maintain their integrity before loading into the carton. The cartoner also had to handle an integrated coupon feeder that needed to be placed in-between the stacks of dryer sheets.

Bottle Automatic Orientation Project

The customer had a window-style carton and their marketing department requested that the logo on the bottle was always shown at the face of the window. This packaging format was required so that the customer buying the product will always look at the logo instead of the back of the bottle when the package is on the shelf. AFA Systems met this request by designing a bucket conveyor with a roller system that tracks the bottles in the bucket. The roller will spin the bottles and ten (10) Cognex cameras with vision on a separate track will search for the bottles logo. Once the logo is in the correct position and the camera has detected it, ten (10) small cylinders will lift the bottles up off the roller track. The bottles will settle back into the bucket conveyor with the bottles in the correct orientation and then an automatic barrel cam loading system will end load the window style carton. This cartoner is running at 450 bottles per minute.