The Aluminum Beverage Can
27th October 2015
roduced by the hundreds of millions every day, the modern can—robust enough to support the weight of an average adult—is a tribute to precision design and engineering
Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.
October 28th, 2015 at 09:09
I did some consulting work for a beer company in NY, specifically working with their can producing plant. (Yes, sadly, no beer was included.) It was interesting to watch the cans being produced. Most fascinating was the printer that puts all the details on the can. It’s only about as long as the can. The partially formed can goes through this ring very quickly and all the printing is completed in that one pass. There were quite a few colors used, each very specific so that every can produced at every plant would be identical.
That particular plant was shut down a few years later. Big breweries have gotten so good at production that they all ended up with excess equipment. That site had some groundwater problems due to an incredibly stupid series of mistakes. There were city water wells across the street and the company guy said that there’s absolutely none of their contamination getting in that water. “Is that where you get the water for your brewery?” “Ummm, no. We built a pipeline to get our water from a different place.” Just to close out the story, that pipeline now furnishes the city with water and the wells are shut down.
Sometimes if it walks like a duck,…..