phone:415/479-5819 · fax:415/492-9325
PACKAGING
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BY
Ben Garvey,
Garvey Corporation 
apered bottles are popular with
consumers, but they offer
unique challenges on a bottling
line. The bottles are wider at
the shoulder than they are at the bottom
and have a tendency to tip where
normal straight-wall bottles travel
easily on conveyors and traditional
accumulation tables.
Rodney Strong Vineyards
(Windsor, CA) installed a new bottling
line in 2006 to allow filling and packing
of the bottles (often called reverse
tapered). Material handling technology
was a very important and critical
part of the engineering process when
designing the new bottling line components.
"We were setting the line up to run
tapered bottles at 180 per minute and
it just made sense to use the Garvey
Infinity tables. Last-in first-out tables
do not work for tapered bottles," says
Jim Magness, Rodney Strong Vineyards
facility manager.
Three Garvey Infinity accumulation
tables were installed to accumulate
and single-file tapered bottles.
Other accumulation systems, such as
a bi-directional conveyor, cannot handle
tapered bottles because they rely
on back-pressure and right angle
transfers to move bottles between conveyors.
The Garvey Infinity accumulates and side transfers
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The first Garvey Infinity accumulation table
retains a full supply of empty bottles (see
cover) so the filler never runs out. If the
upstream uncaser stops (on right, out of
photo), the accumulator table (1,000 bottle
capacity) can feed the filler until the uncaser
delivers more bottles. Bottles enter the table
from right, exit onto conveyor [top-left] to
reach the filler. The Garvey conveyor chain
has high-precision, plastic integrated sliding
surface allowing for smooth bottle transfers
and elimination of down bottles.
on a moving
surface with zero back-pressure.
"You can't have more than about
six to eight tapered bottles accumulate
on a bi-directional conveyor or they
start to fall," adds Magness. "With the
Infinity tables, the bottles do not back
up."
"The theory behind Garvey Infinity
Accumulation is simple," explains Bill
Garvey, president of Garvey Corporation,
Blue Anchor, NJ. "We eliminate
the all too common belt-sander effect
where conveyor chains run underneath
stationary bottles.We allow bottles
to travel continuously around our
patented accumulation loop with zero
pressure and then single-file on
demand using a pneumatically controlled
outfeed gate."
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