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Case Study

Pallet Conveyor for Long Clawson Dairy

Client: Long Clawson Dairy, Leicestershire.Long Clawson Dairy have been making award winning quality cheeses for over a century from theirMelton Mowbray facility. Famous for blue stilton, Clawson also produce a variety of other cheeseswhich can be found in most supermarkets, restaurants and delicatessens.

Brief:Clawsons required 2 separate solutions for 2 different parts of their operation. The first system wasto handle 300kg stillages, double stacked, of unprepared stilton cheese wheels. The brief was to de-sign a lift system to handle the unique stillages and needed to be capable of being reversible be-tween the floors. The start of the process sees the cheese stillages loaded at ground floor level andelevated up to a production area on a mezzanine floor, where the stillages are emptied. Once emp-tied, the system runs in reverse to deliver empty stillages back to the ground floor. This area ischilled.

The second system is located in a separate part of the factory, for the start point, which handles thecheese at the end of line once packed and palletised. The completed pallets are required to transitaway from the end of line production over to the storage/dispatch area in another building which is

connected via a purposebuilt covered bridge overa road way. The palletswill then lower down tothe ground floor ready tobe unloaded by a forklifttruck at an outfeed point.

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Solution:

For the pre-production system CSL designed a custom elevator capable of handling the speciallydesigned cheese stillages, with a reverse function in mind. For the system to work it had to bedesigned using double strand chain pallet modules. Clawson loaded the stillages on at a designatedload point protected by custom made forklift bump stops. The stillages then index into the lift infeed.This area is secured using both mesh fencing and light guards sensors.

The lift elevates the product onto the production mezzanine where it outfeeds onto a palletturntable, this then discharges through a light guard and transits to the offload point ready forremoval with a forklift truck.

The empty stillages can be sent back down by simply reversing the system when empty anddelivering to ground floor.

The post production system works in a similar way, the portioned and wrapped cheeses are packedin cartons and loaded onto a conventional wooden pallet. The full pallets are loaded onto the palletroller conveyor in the production area, these transit across the covered bridge over to thewarehouse/dispatch building. Where the new and old buildings meet, the conveyor had to interactwith a floor to ceiling fire shutter and to ensure this works correctly there is a gap between 2conveyor modules that allow the shutter to completely shut. The fire shutter system was integratedwithin the CSL conveyor software, to ensure that a pallet can never block the shutter in case of anemergency.

After the transit section the pallet arrives at the lift area, if the cell is clear the pallet progressesthrough the light guards and into the guarded area, it then turns 90 degrees using a pallet turnta-ble and in-feeds onto the lift platform.

Once the pallet haslowered to the groundfloor, it outfeeds to a fork-lift offload point for eitherbulk warehouse storage orpreparation for dispatch.

Long Clawson Quote. “WeFound CSL to be very pro-fessional at all times, fromthe solution to completionof the project. The systemwas completed on timeready for our peak seasonalperiod and performed ex-tremely well throughout”.

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