This video is a short few minutes, and features vertical reciprocating conveyors implemented by Cisco-Eagle at defense contractor Electric Boat, Inc. The company manufactures submarines at its Groton, CT facility.

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The Material Handling Industry of America recently announced that the RMI (Rack Manufacturers Institute) has certified several manufacturers of wire rack decking “R-Mark” compliant, meaning that these companies have conformed to the Institute’s testing and utilization standards. The industry developed the latest and most comprehensive consensus documents ANSI MH16.1 – 2008 – Specification for the Design, Testing and Utilization of Industrial Steel Storage Racks and MH26.2 – 2007  – Specification for the Design, Testing and Utilization of Welded Wire Rack Decking. Members of RMI voluntarily choose to conform to ANSI MH16.1 – 2008 and MH26.2 – 2007 and any successor document(s).

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Designing your conveyors and workstations to work together gives you significant safety and efficiency advantages. Using conveyors is a good way to reduce the risks of musculoskeletal injury in tasks or procedures that involve manual handling because conveyors reduce the need for repetitive lifting and carrying, but implementing conveyor into workstations requires some basic understanding of how to prevent stress. As a bonus, well-implemented conveyor workstations also boost productivity.

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It isn’t news that the U.S. has been in a recession for most of the last year. It also isn’t news that you can utilize certain equipment and process improvements to upgrade at lower costs, and even return your investment more quickly in an environment like this one. Here are some ideas.

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Shipping by motor freight

It’s common for websites that ship products via parcel services to calculate shipping costs, making it easy for buyers to learn total costs before ordering. Very few sites can calculate LTL or motor freight shipments for heavy, bulky equipment like industrial shelving, wire security partitions, warehouse racks, or conveyors.

That changes recently, as www.cisco-eagle.com can now provide instant shipping costs.

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Column flow racking is an innovation designed to present vertical columns of cartons to pickers. It works well for light cartons where flow storage and order picking are desired. You can stack cartons in each lane, allowing for more pick faces in the same space.

Although this system isn’t right for every application, it can provide a large number of pick faces for many types of case-picked product in the same space as regular flow racking.

See Column Flow Racking for more details and photos.

Cisco-Eagle’s Systems & Design Manager Darrell Griffin has written an informative article you should check out if you are thinking of installing a mezzanine in your facility. When implementing an Industrial Equipment Platform (mezzanine) be sure that you are not putting too much stress or weight on the floor of the building. Too much weight will cause the floor to crack – or worse. This article tells you how to calculate the correct load capacity and column spacing for any new structural mezzanine project. Floor capacity depends on the thickness of the concrete, but that’s not the end of the story. It also matters how much the soil underneath the slab will compress.

Click “Calculating Mezzanine Floor Capacities” to get the whole story…

Since overloading is a common source of pallet rack collapses, (in fact misapplication, including capacity issues, is the top cause) it’s important to understand how much weight your rack – not just your beams – can bear.

For a piece of storage equipment that is relatively simple, ensuring that the rack can hold what you want it to hold is sometimes complex – particularly on very heavy loads, or large but not so heavy loads. This article focuses on upright frame capacities. Beam capacities are pretty simple – they’re listed per pair of beams by most rack sellers, and you just adhere to them with your pallet loads. But frame capacity is not as straightforward as a beam capacity…

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Hytrol Conveyors has published a free guide to estimating conveyor projects – its innovative “Stockyard Reference Guide.”

The book, which is a short 24-pages, helps you to get ballpark numbers for conveyor projects in a short amount of time. Of course, you can always call us to help you with that kind of thing (and we’ll be more accurate), but this might be faster for you. Not only do you get the cost per foot estimates, there is also some useful information on how to specify, why one conveyor might fit a situation better than others, and more.

The Reference Guide is designed for typical, ball park estimates – enough to help you get started.

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In July, Hytrol Conveyor Company started shipping conveyors with EPAct efficiency motors. The company ships conveyors standard with the motors, at no extra charge. This is a significant upgrade. Besides the savings from EPAct compliance, these motors are invertor-duty from 15hz to 6hz. It also carries a two-year warranty, an extra year compared to the previous, standard duty motors. Generally, the mandated efficiency levels of EPAct motors fall somewhere between the present efficiencies of Baldor’s standard motors and Baldor’s Super-E®premium efficient motors.

The energy savings component varies by motor, hours in usage, loads, and other factors. If you are interested in details, contact us for assistance.