The Isle of Wight Distillery in the UK has recently completed the installation of a complete bottling and labelling line supplied by IC filling Systems srl.
The filler is a gravity filler for spirits in a 9-10-1 rinser filler cork T stopper configuration.
The labeller is a rotary carousel model and it has a full wrap around station for the neck label and one back label with bottle orientation — the front is silk screened.
The design of the line presented a few challenges along the way, due to the unstable reverse conical shape of the bottle. This creates a high baricentre, and a top heavy bottle, easily toppled over, which creates a domino effect.
In order to be able to to accumulate the bottles at entry point into the filler, and between the filler and the labeller, the following special configuration was adopted:
1) Extra long in feed entry worm into the filler (see video)
2) Special linear design of the exchange points between bottle conveyor point with a special design of the infeed into the labeller
3) Extra number of independent transport motors on the conveyor — each motor is independently managed by a centralised control panel to co-ordinate the accumulation and stop and go of each piece of conveyor to avoid extra pressure on more than two bottles, to avoid toppling by domino effect.
This has been accomplished satisfactorily, and the bottles are now leaving regularly the bottling line of Isle of Wight Distillery.