Exol expands small pack production with additional investment

To meet increasing demand for small pack products, Exol Lubricants has invested in an additional six-head Adelphi Masterfil filling machine at its production facility in Wednesbury, enabling the UK’s largest independently-owned lubricants blender to offer even greater flexibility to customers.

Specialising in filling 1 & 5 litre containers, the additional filling line further develops the company’s versatile offering, handling both low and high viscosity lubricants including antifreeze and providing greater capacity for both small and large orders.

Offering 1440 fills per hour, equating to 11,520 fills per eight-hour shift, the machine will enable Exol to produce an additional 2800+ 5-litre boxes or more than 500 1-litre boxes every working day. In total, Exol’s Wednesbury facility can fill, pack and distribute more than 30,000 bottles every day.

The machine’s filling nozzles are programmed to dive slightly, to precisely fill into the neck of the container, which results in the best quality fill for Exol Lubricants’ products. It also enables the filling of products with variable speed filling capacity, ensuring the company manages workloads efficiently depending on current demand.

The pump and nozzle movements, together with the filling speeds, are pneumatically controlled, meaning that a precise custom filling ‘recipe’ can be saved, to optimise the fill for each different product.

With the COVID-19 pandemic bringing to light the critical role sanitation plays in everyone’s daily lives, ‘wetted’ machine parts, which will come into contact with the product, are manufactured from pharmaceutical 316L stainless steel and PTFE.

‘No container, no fill’ sensing also avoids potentially costly waste of containers and product and exceptional filling accuracy of ±0.2% avoids waste and improves cost-efficiency of production.

A Mastercap Capper function offers flexibility, robustness, reliability and speed of application, for Exol’s plastic screw-on type caps. Highly efficient, it is capable of applying up to 60 caps per minute and features hygienic 304 grade stainless steel construction, at a time when hygiene is paramount.

Adelphi Masterfil offers proven reliability and outstanding ISO 9001:2015 certified manufacturing and logistical procedures.

The additional filling line is part of the company’s ongoing trajectory of growth and investment, after it recently upgraded its website, packaging and added a further four Scania trucks to its ever-growing fleet. More investment is planned in 2021 as the company continues to re-invest in all areas of its business.

Steve Dunn, Exol Lubricants sales & marketing director, said: “It’s essential that we continue to offer enhanced flexibility to our customers and our recent round of investments highlights our commitment to ensuring our business is perfectly positioned to support their business. The additional filling line further boosts our capacity for small pack production, an area we have excelled in over recent years.”