It is a pity that your grandpa didn't write this article. No offence to the author however there is no substitute for industry experience.
My father sold tooling for making cans and there were many small but important innovations that came along. It wasn't as if someone sat down and designed the finished thing, innovations came along and the likes of your grandpa and my father made things happen. Sometimes it would be a slither of steel that would be saved per can, other times it would be innovations that would go nowhere - anyone remember transparent pet-plastic cans? No...!
In introducing a change, an incremental change there is no way that the whole production line is going to be upgraded/altered, as in everything else connected to a conveyor belt.
The modern ring-pull tops were obviously a huge part of this story of innovation, as was being able to extrude the base and sides of a can out of a disk. However, the real innovation behind these processes is to have some type of press and tooling that can make these wonderful and intricate shapes in as few steps as possible. That is when you have a business case, and that technology - real technology - is a long way from the 'easy' stuff presented in this article.
Related to alcohol beverages is the story of the Guinness widget:
The Wikipedia article just explains a little bit, however the small bit of plastic in beer cans took decades to get right and the investment level was considerable, even for a brewer the size of Guinness. Combined with the technology that goes into the can, a beer can is quite a technical wonder.
Hehe, he was also part of the group that worked on the extrusion process for Reynolds. He owned a company in Minnesota and there were hired to come in and work on it with them. He's got a lot of great process stories like this. I've actually been recording him talking about his life recently. Here's a passage about a tooling innovation he came up with for the Twin Cities Arsenal during the Vietnam War: https://soundcloud.com/jscheel/frank-scheel-ammunition-work
My father sold tooling for making cans and there were many small but important innovations that came along. It wasn't as if someone sat down and designed the finished thing, innovations came along and the likes of your grandpa and my father made things happen. Sometimes it would be a slither of steel that would be saved per can, other times it would be innovations that would go nowhere - anyone remember transparent pet-plastic cans? No...!
In introducing a change, an incremental change there is no way that the whole production line is going to be upgraded/altered, as in everything else connected to a conveyor belt.
The modern ring-pull tops were obviously a huge part of this story of innovation, as was being able to extrude the base and sides of a can out of a disk. However, the real innovation behind these processes is to have some type of press and tooling that can make these wonderful and intricate shapes in as few steps as possible. That is when you have a business case, and that technology - real technology - is a long way from the 'easy' stuff presented in this article.
Related to alcohol beverages is the story of the Guinness widget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(beer)
The Wikipedia article just explains a little bit, however the small bit of plastic in beer cans took decades to get right and the investment level was considerable, even for a brewer the size of Guinness. Combined with the technology that goes into the can, a beer can is quite a technical wonder.