Monday, September 14, 2009

Because people need their eggs

It turns out that, among the many things in this world that clever people have thought up, there are egg carton machines that turn out 96 cartons a second, twenty-two hours a day. The process starts at one end with a big blender where you dump a truckload-and-a-half of used card board per day, involves an actual half mile of conveyor belt, and this machine...



...which weighs sixty-thousand pounds and comes from Canada, eh.

I stopped by to watch and help out a little after work. I didn't do much, but as it turned out I was the big hero who lined up the one anchor bolt (of nineteen) that was keeping it from lining up on the south side.

UPDATED: To better show the two huge forklifts. Both of them had telescopic frames. With the frames retracted they could maneuver in tight places, and with the frames extended it moved the counterweight farther out, giving it more leverage.

3 comments:

  1. Container factory machines are pretty incredible. I've seen a corrugator machine that spins out a continous sheet of corrugated cardboard 6 feet wide at 40ft/sec if I recall correctly.

    I think somebody told you the wrong weight. I might believe 6 tons, that's only one large industrial/construction forklift holding it.

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  2. Count again. That's two extremely large, 30-ton forklifts. Their capacity is rated at a distance four foot in front of the mast, using forks. For this pick they were using extendable booms, and the weight was a lot more than four foot out. Both factors lowered their capacity a lot. Most of the machine's weight was on the far right corner, making it hard to pick level.

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  3. Mea Culpa. Much bigger forklift than I thought!

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