Tag: Garvey

New Job

Garvey Corporation was started long ago as a gas station in 1926 by an Irish immigrant named Gordon Garvey. He chose a location on Route 73 directly between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, since it would be an ideal place for people to stop for gas coming from either direction. The company moved away from being a service station over the years and evetually got into making sheet metal parts. By the 50’s and 60’s, Gordon’s sons Fran and Bud took over the company and developed their own line of modular conveyor systems to sell to the local glass making industry. In 1980, Mark and Bill Garvey, sons of Bud and Fran, took the helm of the company and expanded its reach into more extensive and complex product handling systems with customers all over the world.

As of last week, I’m the new General Manager.

Infinity Rx

It’s a role I never would have expected to come this soon if at all. It’s nerve racking and exhilarating at the same time and an immense test on my abilities. I like the work I have been doing far more than I ever thought I would and that helps. Wish me luck, as I am responsible for the livelyhood of 80 people and their families. I take that 100% seriously and think about it every day.

Not that I don’t have help! We have a great group, including my brother Jake.

If you’re curious about what we do, check it out: http://www.garvey.com

Also, here’s a case study I wrote for a wine magazine about what our equipment did for Rodney Strong Vineyards.

What I do

I don’t make too many work posts, but here is a quick explanation of what I do every day. I’m the Engineering manager for Garvey Corporation, a company started in 1926 by my great grandfather, Gordon Garvey. We make product handling equipment for high speed packagers in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and consumer products industries. Mainly that means conveyors, accumulators, loaders, unloaders, inspection stations, etc. Our customers are mostly big food companies like Kraft, General Mills; goods producers like Proctor and Gamble; beverage makers like Ocean Spray; and pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Wyeth. We also do a ton of work in the wine industry for Rodney Strong, Don Sebastiani, Mondavi, etc. which was spurred on by my Dad’s work in creating a new type of buffering system to accumulate wine bottles between the filling and labeling machines. We called this new accumulator the Garvey Infinity and have sold hundreds of them since 2001.

The reason for this post is that we’ve come up with a breakthrough accumulation machine for the pharmaceutical industry that I’ve been working on for months. It’s finally finished and it turned out even better than I hoped. It applies all the lessons we learned in the beverage industry and focuses them on super tiny pharmaceutical bottles, sometimes as small as 15mm wide.

Here’s a video of the Infinity Rx accumulating and single filing 2ml 15mm vials at over 850 vials per minute. It’s for a show, so that’s why it loops back into itself.