Eighteen years, hard to imagine, harder still to believe, where does the time go.  1996 was an interesting year for me, I was wrapping up my studies at Cleveland State University looking forward to graduating with my engineering degree. I’d just spent six months with my Army Reserve unit deployed to Haiti supporting the U.N. mission there, returning in time to start winter quarter.   I still remember sitting at my dining room table studying for an upcoming test and getting a call from Glen Roberts of The Cleveland Vibrator Company.  I guess I was engrossed in studying and really wasn’t 100% into answering the phone, I almost hung up on him thinking that he was a telemarketer!

I never really anticipated staying with one company for 18 years.  A quick look on the internet says that the average male has eleven different jobs during a working life time; guess I’m dragging that average down a bit.  So what’s the attraction?  Oyster farming, breakfast cereal, bulk wheat, plastic pellets, scrap recycling, chopped fibers, refractory materials, mushroom spores, beryllium fluoride and licorice bits.  That’s just a quick, off the top of my head, list of projects that have come across my desk in the last month or so.  I guess that’s the attraction, while industrial vibration is at the core of all the problems we solve, the applications are pretty much limitless.  I recall Glen telling me early on,“everyone needs vibration, they just don’t know it yet.”  If you look at the diversity of our customer base and the types of problems we solve, you’d have to agree with that notion.

Oyster farming – During the aftermath of the BP gulf oil spill we were contacted by a contractor involved with the spill cleanup.  He was looking for a small, portable vibratory screener that could be used on beaches to remove tar balls from the sand.  We worked up a compact portable unit and supplied it to that customer.  Eventually we posted a short in-house test video on Youtube (click here to see it in action) and this was seen by another customer who wanted to screen oysters.  It’s an interesting application, screening “market sized” oysters from undersized non-market sized ones.  The first unit we sold was a single deck screener, down sloped SC-E style unit base mounted with two wheels and two fixed height legs, similar to the beach screener.  One of the cool things about the project is that our customer is powering the unit with a solar array which supplies enough energy to power up the variable frequency controller we supplied with the unit.  The solar power makes the unit totally portable, permits use on docks and aboard boats.  After a season of use we’ve had in depth conversations about design changes and modifications based on “lessons learned” during that first season.  Design changes include adding a second deck for screening, adjustable legs to change the slope of the screen deck and a split “overs chute” to facilitate placing the different sized oysters in different containers.  I hope to see this project moving ahead in the near future.

Breakfast Cereal – Weigh, vibrate to compact and move along.  We’re working with another OEM, a provider of power roller conveyors; the end user produces a variety of breakfast cereals.  Our challenge is to integrate a vibratory weigh grid table with the other OEM’s power roller conveyor.  Our vibratory weigh grid table is a great unit for this application.  By adding load cells to the unit we can inflate the airmount isolators to lift a container off the roller conveyor, weigh the box and vibrate the contents during the fill cycle.  Once the target weight is achieved there’s a final period of vibrator to reduce the “cone” of material and finish compacting the product in the box.  After that the airmounts are deflated and the filled and compacted box is lowered to the surface of the rollers and moved out of the fill area.  Our biggest challenge on this project was to provide a low profile, compact unit to fit within the roller section and maintain the end users desired top of roller height.  With a bit of creativity we were able to make that happen.  I enjoy knowing that Cleveland Vibrator and our vibratory weigh grid table plays a small part in putting my next bowl of cereal on the breakfast table.

Bulk Wheat – Move 150 tons, yes, tons per hour of wheat from point A to point B!  The scale of what America does and requires still amazes me!  We’ve just released the detail drawings to our manufacturing plant for a vibratory feeder designed to feed via vibration, wheat.  The unit is 150 inches long, that’s our point A to point B distance, using our EMF, electro-mechanical feeder, design we’re able to meet the customer’s requirements to move the bulk wheat.  I can’t recall moving wheat in the past with our vibratory feeders… Coal, sand, shredded cars, powdered metal, molten “dross”, or almonds, sure, but not wheat.  I have a hard time wrapping my head around 150 tons per hour of anything, flat out that’s lot of wheat.  I guess that I can continue to eat “Wheat Thins” knowing that someplace out west one of our customers is moving a whole lot of wheat, some of which has to be going into my crackers!

Mushroom Spores – bags and bags of them.  Yea, I’ll pass on the mushrooms on my pizza, probably under appreciated by me but that’s the way it goes.  Cleveland Vibrator has worked with a mushroom grower in the past, looking at process mushrooms.  On that older application we ended up providing a vibratory belt table, compact and moving product at the same time.  This most recent application is a bit different.  One of our sales team has been in contact with a mushroom producer and their goal is to take bags of spores that they have processed and then prepare the bags for the next step in the growing sequence.  My understanding of the process is that the spores are treated and then bagged; sometime later the bags of spores need to be “broken up” as the prior step causes the spores to become clumped together into a block.  The goal is to get back to a bag of more or less individual spores.

The initial concept was that the clump could be broken up with a vibratory table or belt table perhaps with a row of stationary rollers above the bag, with the table essentially pushing “the bag-o-spores” up into the rollers and breaking them up.  Two for our Sales guys worked diligently with the customer’s representative, trying various frequencies and force combinations and really weren’t getting the results that they’d hoped to see.  I got called in at the last minute to see if I might have a fresh approach that would prove more successful.  After some discussion of what they’d tried and how they’d achieve some limited results, my first thought was to use an extended pneumatic piston vibrator to see if we could “hit” the bag from above, thereby breaking up the block of spores.  The extended piston vibrator is rather unique, as the name suggests we “extend” the piston through the cap of the vibrator and have a tapped hole at the end of the extension.  Typically the unit is shipped with a rubber bumper attached.   We’ve used the extended piston before on some other unconventional applications, banging baking pans for instance, so this seemed right up the extended piston vibrator’s “crazy alley”.   I gathered up some supplied to include a 1200 VMRAC-EP, extended piston vibrator, a short section of a 4×4 typically saved for building shipping skids, some other wood scraps and the vibratory feeder in the test lab. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a bumper as large as I wanted to use so I ended up welding a bolt to a six inch long piece of 3” diameter pipe and making my own bumper.  I ended up bolting the VMRAC-EP to the 4×4, clamping that to the vibratory feeder with the vibrator’s piston extending into the feeder.  Presto-chango!  We had a vibratory feeder with a 3” diameter tube moving up and down to impact along the width of the bag. The feeder was turned on, air provided to the VMRAC-EP and we were able to feed the bag via vibration under the tube bumper which was able to break up the clump of spores without breaking the bag.  While this was a down and dirty approach, the concept was proved, so we’ll see if this project moves ahead, hopefully it will.

If variety is the spice of life, I most certainly get my share of it here at Cleveland Vibrator.  In the end that’s why I’m still hanging around, interesting projects, a huge variety of applications, good folks to work with and the opportunity to help solve problems and keep things moving for our customers.  Hopefully you get some sense of what Cleveland Vibrator can do to help solve a wide variety of challenges and I haven’t even touched on the individual vibrator applications.

Maybe you have a unique application for vibration? See what The Cleveland Vibrator Fabricated Equipment Department can do for you.