Published 5th January, 2022 by Greg Morris

Mexican glass manufacturer, Vidrio Formas has successfully installed Heye International’s latest SmartLine 2 including Ranger 2 check inspection equipment to deliver high performance at its new production site in Lerma.

Developed in Germany as an inspection and sorting machine for the global hollow glass community, the SmartLine 2 device incorporates Heye’s latest cold end equipment innovations.

These include a high speed outfeed belt, multi servo drives, high precision check detection and multi-point non-contact thickness detection.

The equipment is required to service an expansion of production capacities at Vidrio Formas, which has recently opened a second glass packaging facility with a new furnace and two additional production lines.

High performance inspection, a reduction of spare parts inventories, reduced operating costs and the Smartline’s 2 digitisation capabilities were essential elements in Vidrio Formas’s purchasing decision.

The SmartLine 2 was manufactured entirely at Heye’s Nienburg factory in Germany.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, users were trained by Heye personnel on site in Mexico. The customer commissioned the machines supported remotely by Heye staff.

"We have known Heye International as a reliable partner for many years. The inspection machines meet all of our requirements.

"Reliability and failure safety are particularly important to us, based on good experience of the Heye professionals," says Alex Schneeweiss, Operations Manager at Vidrio Formas,

“For these reasons we have ordered two more inspection machines.”

Greg Morris has been editor of Glass International and organiser of the Glassman conferences since 2012, specialising in glass packaging. Prior to this he spent five years working in newspaper journalism.