We don't ever see problems, only challenges. But when Paul Mitchell of Westmill Foods here in the UK contacted us, he had a big problem!

Paul is responsible for the can making department at Westmill, which manufactures 25 litre round pails and ends, which are filled with cooking oils by this Associated British Foods Plc subsidiary. They have two welded can making lines at Westmill, one with a Sargiani back end, and the other with an MGR back end. Both lines employ two seamers, one for the top and one for the bottom component. The lines were originally purchased secondhand, and the tooling specifications were inherited, and Paul was really struggling to understand why he had different seaming roll designs and profile variants for the different seamers, when he was seaming the same bodies and top and bottom components on each line.

Paul supplied us with samples of the Sargiani and MGR 1st and 2nd operation seaming rolls for both the tops and bottoms, and we made drawings of all the roll bodies, and scanned the profiles for comparison. Nothing was quite the same.

But by comparing the scanned profiles to our extensive library of seaming roll profile drawings, we could see some similarity with profiles employed for A10 size cans, but these were in themselves too small for the larger flanges and curls of the Westmill components. We therefore scaled up the A10 can size profiles and designed a new Sargiani seaming roll body for the prototype profiles.

We manufactured a batch of four 1st ops, and four 2nd ops which Paul fitted to their Sargiani bottom component seamer, and the resulting double seams were spot on! The same rolls were then fitted to the Sargiani top component seamer, and the results repeated.

Now all that needed to be done was to make a set of MGR rolls with the same profiles. But Paul had a better idea; he asked us to design a new MGR seaming roll pin that would allow him to fit the Sargiani rolls on the MGR top and bottom seamers. And that worked fine too.

So now Paul has a common seaming roll body design, and is the running the same 1st and 2nd operation profiles on all his four seamers. And to ensure Paul has complete traceability for the future, we gave him the seaming roll body and profile drawings. And even better, we only charged him for making the rolls, not for doing the engineering or supplying the drawings.

Does your existing seamer tooling manufacturer provide this level of service?

For more information about our TAJ Seamer Tooling click here.