Fresh meat, cheese or ham – there is almost no food that universal slicers from Graef can’t cut into the thinnest of slices with ease. Neither continuous operation nor contact with pieces of gristle are enough to wear them out. Christoph Bergmann, a product manager at Graef, knows better than anybody how hard the slicer’s motor has to work. “We used to make the drive motors for the blades ourselves, then we had the same supplier for complete motors for a long time. But they no longer met our standards for durability or workmanship, and their costs had increased too much.”
Custom fit
During its search for a reliable and more economical alternative for household appliances, Graef came across the KM 43 series of capacitor motors from ebm-papst, which features high power, long service life and a compact design. However, the motor needed to slim down at the edges in order to fit into the slicer’s design. “So we modified the motor’s bearing brackets to make them a perfect fit for the machine’s housing,” says Harald Böhm, Key Account Manager at ebm-papst. In addition, ebm-papst uses a worm gear solution instead of a simple gear on the shaft, making the transmission of power to the blade much quieter.
We began looking for a powerful drive motor that was compact enough to fit in the existing machine.
Christoph Bergmann, product manager at Graef
Since Graef was pleased with the capacitor motor’s performance, it approached ebm-papst with another challenge. Its universal slicing machine for commercial applications is available in a model with an automatic carriage that effortlessly moves the material to be sliced back and forth over the blade. For the carriage, Graef used a motor whose power was no longer sufficient to meet its customers’ increasing demands on the machine’s speed. “So we began looking for a powerful drive motor that was compact enough to fit in the existing machine,” says Bergmann. Now an EC motor from the ECI 63 series moves the carriage back and forth up to 70 times per minute.
Efficiency for the future
Graef also appreciates the ECI 63’s high efficiency. “Right now lower energy consumption is a nice side effect,” says Bergmann. “But in the future, big supermarket chains will be taking a closer look at the energy used by the machines they buy. Using the ECI 63 has resulted in a big improvement that makes our machines even more energy-efficient.”
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