Ever wonder how aluminum cans are made? – IOTW Report

Ever wonder how aluminum cans are made?

Me either. But I found this video slightly interesting-

The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can

Bill details the engineering choices underlying the design of a beverage can He explains why it is cylindrical, outlines the manufacturing steps needed to created the can, notes why the can narrows near it lid, show close ups of the double-seam that hold the lid on, and details the complex operation of the tab that opens the can.

14 Comments on Ever wonder how aluminum cans are made?

  1. My Dad worked for the Miller Beer can plant in the 70s. He would pull a color and take the “rare” cans home. Beer can collectors paid a nice price for them.

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  2. Steven in Vegas: Your dad was a futurist. A genius.

    I watched this video a couple weeks ago. Amazing tech. It makes the “tech” i grew up with look like the 19th century tech it was.

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  3. Old joke involving the English sense of humor:

    An Englishman visits the U.S. and tours a farm. He tells the farmer, “You produce such an astounding amount of food. What do you do with it all?”

    The farmer, being a bit of a wit, replies, “Well, we eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.”

    The Englishman says, “That’s jolly good. I shall have to tell my good friend Reginald that one when I get back home.”

    Back in England, the Englishman is talking to his friend and says, “You know, the farmers in America produce a huge quantity of food. Do you know what they do with it all?”

    Reginald replies that he does not.

    The Englishman says, “Well, they eat what they can, and what they can’t, they put up in tins”.

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  4. Now I’ll finally get a good night’s sleep.
    Engineering really is marvelous. Human ingenuity is astonishing.

    I guess that’s why Biden’s candidacy is so chilling.
    The culture that produced the aluminum can also excreted Biden and Harris.
    Such genius and imbecility in the same species!
    Wobbles the mind!

    izlamo delenda est …

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  5. My dad was in the old school. He set up the splitters which cut sheets of steel (coated with tin and having the lithography label and the appearance of the sheets of money) into the can bodies, which were soldered and had bottom added and sent on freight cars to juice factories. They did switch to aluminum, but same setup.

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  6. Tim
    OCTOBER 20, 2020 AT 7:10 AM

    “I guess that’s why Biden’s candidacy is so chilling.
    The culture that produced the aluminum can also excreted Biden and Harris.
    Such genius and imbecility in the same species!
    Wobbles the mind!”

    …the sad fact of the matter is that these things are not related, our tech cannot and will never be able to overcome our failings as human beings.

    I work with robots. I’ve programmed robots. I know robots down to the bit level and the component level.

    They are quite clever technology, an assemblage of gears and motors, wires and computers, encoders and sensors so it can do repeatable things in strict adherence to its programmed algorithms to the extent it is physically maintained well enough to do them. Man has made something that can simulate the movements of humans but is many times stronger and many times more precise.

    But man can give it neither a soul, nor an intelligence.

    The robot does not “think”. It is given a set of instructions by a human as to where it should go, what it should do, how it should use information from its external sensors and encoders, and how it should react if certain sensors indicate an emergency. Done well, it appears to be “Smart”, and “knows” what to do and not do.

    But that’s not ITS brain, its programming from a God-created HUMAN brain that had to think about everything it was supposed to do and NOT do, and how it should react to certain sensor input. It “Knows” nothing other than what the programmer thought of FOR it, within the limitations of its sensors and its range of movement.

    And programming is a one-man birthday party, you don’t get any presents you don’t bring, and not everyone can think of everything, as planes that crashed because of autopilot programming errors and spacecraft that crashed because of measurement system input errors could tell you if they weren’t entirely destroyed by it. You can SEE the human brain in them as not everyone programs the same way, and I can identify some programmers by the way they program alone.

    The machines are not smart of themselves. They are tools of humans, no different than hammers or screwdrivers. They do nothing without human impetus.

    They also do not “care”. They have no soul, no morals, no scruples, no sense of horror, or of empathy, or of shame. They will build without pride and kill without remorse because they do not care, they only do what they are TOLD to do without regard to WHAT they do, it’s just whatever a human says.

    They do not care, because they can not care. They don’t love or hate any more than your car or your gun does, they just do what they are told. They have no thought of good or evil…because they have no thoughts at ALL.

    …so these things are not connected. Someone made aluminum can making tech to solve a very specific and not political problem, because that was the job. Those people gave no more though to the rise of Biden any more than the robots did because they exist in separate universes. It is not correct to say the same culture gave rise to both because one thought only of solving very specific issues while the other thinks only of enslavement of others to their will, and these are not the same people any more than Christians and Muslims are the same people, they just sometimes inhabit the same space for vastly different reasons.

    And the sad fact is that those who think to enslave can use those who wish to create for their own ends if they are successful, and have them produce funeral urns or fill those cans with poisons if they see fit.

    Anything Man makes can be corrupted by Man if God’s not in it, which is why the Democrats so relentlessly seek to exclude him and punish His people.

    And THAT, @Tim, is the TRULY chilling part…

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  7. Remember the old pop tops which came off the can? Some of them had notches in the ring part, and if you broke off the tab part, you could put it in the notch, pull it back and launch the ring about thirty feet. And launch Jimmy Buffett’s career about thirty million dollars.

    We used to look for those pop tops at the curb, along with matchbooks. something else you don’t see anymore. I guess it’s all for the better, though.

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  8. SNS,
    Sorry. It is the same culture. The Engineers crafted the Aluminum can to solve a specific need (desire, more precisely) and the politicians crafted the Biden/Harris team to solve a specific need (desire, more precisely).
    That one group concerned itself with the conveyance of liquids while the other concerned itself with the enslavement of a World, there is no apparent difference in their culture. That people of other cultures have conveyed liquids and conspired to conquer worlds doesn’t imply that the conveyance of liquids and/or the conquest of worlds is peculiar to any one culture.

    Indeed, it seems that most cultures (if not all) participate in the conveyance of liquids and regularly have members (either individually or collectively) who aspire to conquer the World. As I haven’t given it (conveyance of liquids and the concomitant conquest of worlds) ample study I feel(!) compelled to declare that my statements were, more or less, off the cuff. But thank you for the explanation of the existentially Godless nature of robotics.

    izlamo delenda est …

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  9. In 1975, I went camping on the coast of Wales. I met an English family and one night we sat around a fire to visit. I asked them if they’d like a drink and ended up giving them Dr Pepper’s which I purchased on the American Air Force base I was stationed at. They had never seen a Dr Pepper as they weren’t available in the UK at that time. The husband began to study the can and I watched as he turned it around several times. he finally exclaimed that the can had no seam. I agreed. He said that it was impossible for the can to have no seam. I disagreed. He worked with metal in his job of building custom medical devices for people like leg braces so he knew a lot about metal and how it was formed. He couldn’t get over the fact that the can had no seam. I told him that in America, we had discontinued the use of steel cans with welded seams years before but the technology had not reached the UK, yet. He looked at the can as if it were from outer space and asked if he could have it. Sure, I said! He took it to work with him to show his co-workers and he wrote to me how they all marveled at the can and tried to imagine how the hell the Americans had managed to come up with such an idea. I told him it was probably part of the NASA moon program. He died recently but the last time he wrote to me, he said he still had that can. By the way, they all loved the Dr Pepper I gave them and it’s very popular in the UK, today.

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