Tag: tube conveyor

Practice Makes Perfect

Published on by exaircorpLeave a comment
2016 Eagles
NEW Eagles Football Jersey for 2016

Last year, I wrote a few blogs about how I was an assistant coach for my oldest son’s youth football team. We had an amazing season that ended with a 2nd round playoff loss and a 3rd place finish overall. Not too shabby for a new group of players and coaches. Now, the new season is upon us with practice beginning next Monday. Our new roster is pretty much the opposite of last season, as we now have 11 returning players from last year’s team and 4 newcomers. The coaching staff has stayed intact as well, so we are hoping to improve on last year’s successes and bring home the championship this year! But hey, we are talking about 7 and 8 year old boys here, so ANY type of success is a win in itself.

After a brief coaches meeting over the weekend, we have decided to hold practice 3 days a week this year, compared to 2 days last. We are hoping the extra practice will help us implement some more pass plays in the offense and work on extending our defensive sets, which cost us at the end of last year. For me personally, I am excited to see how my own son has grown from his first season of learning how to block and tackle the right way, to being more involved in the offense. He is one of the fastest kids on the team but got a little nervous whenever we tried to get him the ball on a rush or pass play. He and I have spent A LOT of time this spring and early summer, throwing the ball and working on his ball carrying skills. From what I’ve seen in our yard, I am pretty excited to see what unfolds on the football field. I keep telling him that he’s going to have some dropped passes and fumbled balls, but the important thing is to not get discouraged and keep trying. After all, practice makes perfect.

Here at EXAIR, we adopt the same philosophy. We are dedicated to putting in the time and effort to develop new and useful compressed air operated products. The following is a list of some new products now available:

  • New 2.5″ and 3″ Line Vac and Threaded Line Vac in 316SS and High Temperature construction

    Standard Line Vac: aluminum or SS
    Standard Line Vac in aluminum or stainless steel
  • New 2.5″ and 3″ Heavy Duty Line Vac with smooth or threaded ends. Hardened Alloy Construction for better abrasion resistance.

    Heavy Duty Line Vac: Hardened Alloy Construction and High Performance
    Heavy Duty Line Vac: Hardened Alloy Construction and High Performance

To discuss these new products or any EXAIR product, please contact an application engineer for assistance.

Justin Nicholl
Application Engineer
justinnicholl@exair.com
@EXAIR_JN

Conveying Valve Keepers with a Line Vac Air Operated Conveyor

Published on by Lee EvansLeave a comment
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Valve keepers

In some of my previous blogs I’ve written about rebuilding engines at home, usually finding a decent car that suffered top-end engine damage.  Sometimes the root cause is a lack of oil pressure, other times it is a failed component in the valve train, or something as simple as a broken timing belt.  In any case, these rebuilds tend to involve removing the cylinder heads from the engine, disassembling them and replacing the damaged components.

Capture
These valve keepers need to be pneumatically conveyed

A commonly damaged component with timing belt or valve train failure is the valve.  And, removing the valve means removing the valve keepers, which are the items shown above.

I received an email from our distributor in Italy, searching for a solution to convey these valve keepers at a rate of approximately 5000 per hour over a distance of 3 meters and a height of 4 meters.  The valve keepers are quite light, weighing just 0.29 grams each – a perfect fit for use with the Line Vac.

When considering a conveyance application we take into account several variables such as:

Bulk density of the material

Shape/size of the material

Conveying distance

Conveying height

Required conveyance rate

Available compressed air supply

Given the need to convey 5000 valve keepers per hour at a weight of 0.29 grams/valve keeper, we only needed to move ~1.5kg per hour for this application.  When considering the height and distance involved, and the size of the valve keepers, we can comfortable convey these units with a ¾” Line Vac or a 1” Line Vac.  Using 10.7 and 14.7 SCFM, respectively, these options provide a suitable solution with a low compressed air demand.

If you have an application in need of a compressed air solution, contact an EXAIR Application Engineer.  We’ll be happy to help.

Lee Evans
Application Engineer
LeeEvans@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_LE

1st photo credit to Benjamin Hirsch (Creative Commons License)

Congrats Cleveland, The Cavs Are NBA Champions!

Published on by exaircorpLeave a comment

Living in Cincinnati, it’s somewhat of an unwritten rule for sports fan that we don’t root for any Cleveland professional sports teams. Take for example the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals, in-state rivals that just happen to both play in the AFC North division of the National Football League. Both of these teams were also founded by the same coach, Paul Brown, and share the same color orange in their uniforms. In Major League Baseball you have the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians. The Reds were the first professional baseball team with the Indians following suit just a few yeas later. Although not league or division rivals, they still compete in interleague games dubbed by fans as the “Ohio Cup” or the “Battle of Ohio”.

When it comes to basketball, Cincinnati doesn’t have a professional team anymore so there isn’t any real feel of loyalty to any particular franchise. In Cleveland though, they have the Cavaliers who have been successful over the past few years, albeit with a little bit of controversy from one of their own – Lebron James, who was raised nearby in Akron, Ohio. I am a long time basketball fan who appreciates great talent. What I don’t care for is the “me first” attitude that has become all too common lately with professional athletes. The “King”, as James refers to himself, abandoned “his City” back in 2010 to join the Miami Heat organization to chase an NBA championship. He made the announcement in a live broadcast event called “The Decision” in which he announced he was ‘taking his talents to South Beach (Miami) and promised “not one, not two, not three…… championships”, which drew critics in the national media, as well as drawing the ire of fans back in Ohio. While he did help guide the Heat to the title in 2012 and 2013, he also lost a couple Finals appearances in 2011 and 2014.

At the end of the 2014 season, James did a little bit of soul searching and decided to return home to Cleveland to deliver a championship. His first year back, 2015, the Cavs finished the regular season with a 53-29 record and made their way to the NBA Finals. During the Finals run though, the Cavs lost their starting point guard and their starting shooting forward to injury. Needless to say this completely changed the teams dynamic, as without the extra support, Lebron was only able to carry his team two victories and they lost the series 4-2 to the Golden State Warriors.

Fast forward to this year. For the majority of the year, the two best teams in the NBA were the same as last year with Golden State leading the Western Conference and the Cavaliers leading the East. The Warriors broke an NBA record for the most wins during a regular season, finishing with a 73-9 record, breaking the 72-10 record previously held by the Chicago Bulls (led by the greatest of all-time, Michael Jordan – IMHO). Both teams had their struggles through their respective playoff runs but as fate would have it, would meet again to determine a champion. Golden State hosted the first two gams and pretty much manhandled the Cavs before heading to Cleveland with a 2-0 record. Game 3 was the polar opposite of the first two games, as Cleveland was able to secure game 3 with a 120-90 victory. The next game seemed to end all hope for the Cavs as Golden State dominated the final quarter to lead the series 3-1 before heading back to California.

Now, there has NEVER been an NBA team come back from a 3-1 deficit to win the title, so things were looking pretty bleak for Cleveland. It seemed the man who promised so much to “His City” was once a again going to fall short of delivering that elusive Championship. But as fate would have it, somehow, someway, the Cavs were able to regroup and come out completed dialed in and focused on the goal at hand. Well, really it came down to 2 key players for the Cavs, the starting point guard and Lebron James. Both players played out of their minds and willed their team to victories in game 5 and game 6, setting up a much anticipated game 7 finale.

Game 7 held up to the billing, it was awesome, even if you’re just a casual sports fan. The contest went back and forth with neither team getting out to more than an 8 point lead. The game came down to the last minute as both teams were tied with the Cavs point guard hitting a clutch 3-pointer that gave Cleveland the lead. The Cavs were able to hold on and win by 4 points, securing Cleveland’s first championship in almost 50 years. Lebron finished with a triple-double, only 1 of 3 players to hold that honor in Game 7 of the finals and was named the series’ MVP.  Lebron’s average for the Finals were 30.2 points, 11.3 rebounds and 8.5 assists. Basically, he lead every recorded stat out of every player, he undoubtedly led “his” team to the title. It really was a fun series, even for the casual fan.

So congratulations Cleveland!

EXAIR has played a part in the fun of the NBA as well. Our Line Vac Air Operated Conveyors have been incorporated into a specially designed Gatling gun used to launch T-Shirts into the crowd at Milwaukee Bucks’ games. We’d like to see the Cavaliers get one of these too!

Check out this video:

 

Justin Nicholl
Application Engineer
mailto:justinnicholl@exair.com
@EXAIR_JN

 

Light Duty Line Vac Conveys the “Slugs” from a Die Punch Application

Published on by Neal RakerLeave a comment

At EXAIR, we get asked a lot of interesting questions about what our products can do. One of them that occurs with some frequency is, “Can your Line Vac convey slugs from a stamping operation?” The answer is usually yes as “slugs” (the material punched out of a sheet of stock to create a hole) are well suited in size, shape and weight to be conveyed effectively with the Line Vac product. We are used to this question from folks who are processing various types of metal sheet. The slugs tend to build up within their tooling and basically get in the way, if not even jam up the tooling from time to time. So getting rid of them from the process becomes a necessity that is, many times, not addressed during the tool making process.

Recently, we had another customer with this same kind of problem with foam. They were processing a foam sheet by punching a many holes in it which generated the waste stream you see above. Little pieces of foam about 8 – 10 mm in diameter and about 40 mm long. As you probably have guessed by now, the area that was set up to receive these renderings quickly became loaded full with the foam slugs. The customer needed to find a way to remove the slugs to a remote area so the receiving container could be switched out easily without stopping production. The original container was small, plastic bin about the size of a kitchen garbage can. The new receiving container was a large cardboard box that typically goes by the term Gaylord. The customer needed to set the Gaylord about 3 – 4 meters away from the die punching area. This is where the EXAIR model 130300 (3” Light Duty Line Vac) comes into play. The customer fabricated a chute that was positioned under the area to catch the slugs. The chute transitions to accept the 3” Light Duty Line Vac for connection at the bottom. Then, a 3” hose is connected to the output side of the Light Duty Line Vac so it could blow the slugs over to the Gaylord.

P1060775
Foam Slugs From Die Stamping Process

The customer chose the Light Duty Line Vac because it uses less air than a comparable size of our Standard Duty units. They didn’t need a tremendous amount of suction power due to the light-weight nature of the slugs. They also wanted a 3” unit to make sure none of the product would get caught anywhere within the conveying stream.

With the new Light Duty Line Vac installed, the operators do not have to spend as much time tending to the emptying of the previous, small containers that had to be used due to their size for fitting into the catch area. For an application where thousands of these slugs are produced in an hour, the productivity gain was significant. The customer didn’t place an exact value on the gain, but are considering this method for other, similar processes they have in the plant.

Neal Raker, International Sales Manager
 nealraker@exair.com
@EXAIR_NR