Ska Fabricating has begun distributing its new Microbus depalletizers, which can fold up to a footprint about the size of pallets it was made to unload.
The Microbus can move empty aluminum cans off a pallet and through to a cleaning station, before being filled with beer, at a speed of 30 cans per minute.
“We take a pallet of bulk containers, put it into the machine, it lifts up a layer and then pushes that layer onto conveyance and eventually the filler,” said Ska Fabricating CEO Jim Mackay.
Made for small breweries, when the Microbus is not in use, it can be folded up and easily moved to maximize available space in a brewery.
“Microbus is our smallest and most portable machine,” Mackay said. “It’s really meant for the lower end of the market, and pricing wise it’s really meant to be affordable for the small beverage manufacturer.”
The Microbus costs about $20,000, Mackay said. He said that for most small breweries the return on investment for the Microbus is likely between three and six months.
“Our research tells us we should be able to move two units per week,” he said. “We’re still early in the manufacturing process and refining it, but we think to build one of these things is down to about 10 hours.”
Being a smaller machine, the Microbus is cheaper to ship and it doesn’t require a Ska Fabricating employee to travel to individual breweries to set it up like some other pieces of equipment, Mackay said.
“Some of our more complex machines we’ll send installers out with, but we anticipate with this, the end user can set it up themselves,” he said. “That’s really key to this machine. If they can’t afford a big machine, they probably can’t afford to have someone flown out to install it.”
Ska Fabricating mechanical engineer Brian Pisani said when Ska Fabricating designs a new piece of equipment it has to think about what type of customer they’re building a product for.
“It really depends on what kind of customer we’re looking at, are we looking at a customer that is going to be running high speeds at a high volume, or are we looking at a much smaller brewery,” Pisani said. “The Microbus is designed for breweries that can every once in a while, as opposed to breweries that can every day.”
A big part of the design consideration was that the Microbus be the footprint size of a pallet, Pisani said.
“We know they probably have pallets, and if we can build it to kind of that size footprint, we know that they’re going to have that space somewhere for storage.” he said.
The first Microbus was installed and tested for Ska Fabricating at Fenceline Cider in Mancos.
Mackay said Ska Fabricating has more than 3,000 different depalletizers out on the market, with the Microbus just being its latest model.
Ska Fabricating grew out of the need of Ska Brewing Co. for more specialized equipment to fit the space and production needs of the brewery.
“When the brewery decided that they wanted to get into canning, back in 2008 or so, what was available on the market as far as canning machinery was big, fast, expensive and made for the Coors of the world,” he said.
With the Microbus, Ska Fabricating continues on its founder Matt Vincent’s principle of making canning equipment that was designed to meet the needs of craft breweries.
“We still want to stay true to our core, which is to provide an affordable automated solution for any size company that needs to depalletize,” Mackay said.
njohnson@durangoherald.com
