First aluminum
Hawaii Brewing steals a march on mainland packagers with the first continuous impact-extrusion can-making and filling line, now turning out 57,600 cans of Primo per day
For many months, cost-conscious American brewers have had their eyes on Goettingen, Germany, where aluminum slugs were being fed into one end of a line to emerge as filled and labeled cans of beer at the other. This seemed to be a revolutionary new principle in packaging, which could reduce material costs to the minimum and keep can supply under the control of the brewer.
Today, they can look to Hawaii, where just such a principle is being applied by an enterprising Honolulu brewery to turn out the first aluminum can of beer ever produced and marketed on American soil. The packaging repercussions are certain to ripple the Pacific all the way back to the mainland.
At the Hawaii Brewing Corp., one continuous automatic operation, the first of its type to be seen in any American packaging plant, does this:
1. turns out one-piece, 11-oz. aluminum-can bodies at 120 a minute per machine simply by hitting a ¾e -in.-thick disk of aluminum in a die with a piston driven by 400 tons of pressure.
2. trims and flanges the rough-edged can.
3. washes, etches and dries the can in a 36-ft. continuous unit.
4. sprays the interior with an alcohol-resistant lacquer coating.
5. bakes coating in an 8-min. continuous oven,
6. feeds the cans through an unscrambler into the filling line.
7. fills the sterile cans with beer in a 50-head automatic machine and then seams on the separate, concave lids.
8. sends the filled and sealed cans through a pasteurizer and cooler.
9. check weighs each can and rejects low fills.
10. applies a wrap-around silver foil-paper label,
11. automatically cartons the finished product in
End product of revolutionary automatic operation is ll-oz.-content can transformed from an aluminum slug to a filled, sealed and foil-paper-labeled container weighing less than one-half as much as tinplate can. Direct lithography of metal body soon will replace the paper label entirely.
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MODERN PACKAGING