New Can-o-mat shaper for cans
Shaped cans seem to have become more popular for coffee and milk powder as of late and there are several processes on the market, like mechanical forming, blow molding or high pressure forming.
Cantec prefers mechanical forming because the tooling is simpler, the process is much faster and needs little energy. On the other hand, the kind of shapes and expansion rate is limited.
Normally it is a double step process, consisting of a combination of die shaping followed by spread expanding. The die shaper expands and forms both ends of the welded body to the final end diameter on a correct homogeny round shape including a small per flange in order to stabilise the edge. The length of the die expansion in axial direction depends on the final shape and is as much as possible. Most of the height reduction of the can body while shaping is done in the die shaping step.
The spread expanding station controls the segmented expanding tool. This tool makes the final shape of the can. The spread expanding tool is of a special design without linear guides of the forming segments. Another specialty of the Cantec spread expander is the operating in double action mode. The forming segments produces marks on the expanded surface of the can body always there where the gap between the segments opens. This results in an in-homogeny polygenic surface which doesn’t look so nice. The Cantec spread expander overcomes this problem by help of the double action mode. The first action is the normal spread expanding to the final diameter, which makes the shape including the usual marks.
During the second action the expanding tool closes a little bit, the can body is turned half a pitch and the expanding tool opens a second time to the final diameter. This reforms the expanding marks and eliminates them nearly complete, which results in a nice homogeny surface. Both actions are done in the same spread expanding station automatically.
The available operations of the new Can-o-mat shaper series are die shaping and spread expanding as a two station stand-alone machine or as a combination including spin flanging and double seaming.
The following machines are available:
- Can-o-mat. I shaper: dia. range 52 – 73 mm, height up to 140 mm, capacity up to 500 cpm.
- Can-o-mat .II shaper: dia. range 73 – 99 mm, height up to 180 mm, capacity up to 375 cpm.
- Can-o-mat. II shaper: dia. range 99 – 153 mm, height up to 180 mm, capacity up to 250 cpm.
This machine offers the possibility to produce nice shaped cans on a normal can making line at relative high speed and relative low costs.
