My wife will be the first person to tell you that she hates shopping.  At almost six feet tall, it can be a challenge for her to find something that fits right with an arm length that isn’t some place closer to the elbow when it should be at the wrist.  Therefore, it always kills me when she comes home with something that is touted to be “one size fits all” my standard response is “one size fits none!”    Over the years, I’ve found that this theory applies to material handling equipment as well.  On most applications, each customer’s requirements are just a bit different from the previous set of design parameters.

When I first started working at The Cleveland Vibrator Company, we had a “fabricated equipment catalog.” While units were displayed as “standards,” the salesmen would invariably get an order for a piece of equipment and say “it’s just like our standard except for X, Y, and Z changes!”  For me, this really became a running joke with the sales people.  It got to the point where I started looking at our equipment orders as “tailoring” to the particular needs of the customer.  We rarely reinvent the wheel.  Typically, we find ourselves “hemming the pants or letting out the waist” on a “standard unit” that is close to what the customer needs yet doesn’t quite fit their particular installation.

One of the more tailored units is our BT Vibratory Conveyor Belt Table, a piece of equipment that we’ve been making for over 20 years, that integrates a vibrating table with a conveyor belt.  The belt table lets customers compact, settle, flatten or de-air packaged products while moving it from point “A” to “B”.  Design parameters include the width, length and height of the conveyor belt as well as its travel speed, tailored as required to match existing surrounding equipment.  The force, stroke, frequency and length of vibration are also tailored to the customer’s material and process goal.

We recently finished rather interesting vibratory belt table for a customer.  They wanted a very small and compact unit that could be table mounted which was capable of settling nuts in a small bulk container.  Starting with what was required to compact the product material, we selected the appropriate vibrator motors to gives us the necessary force, stroke and frequency to quickly and effectively settle the nuts in their package.  Then we worked to compress the design into as small an envelope as possible to fit the special constraints of the surrounding packaging line equipment.  All the standard characteristics of our larger belt table were present in the design yet in a much smaller package.  The resulting unit was only 24 inches long, a bit over 14 inches tall with a 14 inches wide conveyor belt – by far the smallest vibratory belt table we’ve made and tailored to fit this customer’s space and process constraints.

At The Cleveland Vibrator Company we understand that when it comes to vibratory equipment, rarely does “one size fit all.” We look forward to working with customers to design the right solution for their unique application. If you have an application, contact us.