Gregg Epstein of Perry Videx LLC joins David to discuss various powder blenders and their values. #BlackbirdTV
About this segment of Blackbird TV
Guest: Gregg Epstein, President / CEO, Perry Videx LLC. To learn more about our guest, visit PerryVidex.com, or call 609-267-1600.
Recorded: September 10, 2020
Published: October 19, 2021
Segment transcript
Like to introduce Gregg Epstein, let’s pick another obscure vertical and talk about what’s important or what to look out for. Powder blending. Powder blending? Powder blending equipment is very, very popular. Powder blending is anything from—and there are four or five different ways you can blend powders— but most of the process world, the chemical, the pharma world, even the food world at some point in the process and you have dry product, powdered product, what do you do with it? How do you mix that together? If you’re not mixing dry into wet, which is a mix tank, you’re just mixing two dry products, there are three or four different methods that you can use, all of them involve tumbling. One is a ribbon or a paddle blender where you have a stationary tank and you have a horizontal shaft is just mixing and mixing. Mixing. Going like this, OK, and fluffing. That’s one type of mixing. A different type of mixer is you put different products into a large blender that’s a V, the whole blender rotates around. I call those “pant leg” blenders. Is that jargon that I should use or is that accurate? I think that’s Buffalo specific. Come on now. V leg blender. V blender. A pant-leg blender. Twin shell blender. How about, it’s almost like a Kleenex. We used to call them PK blenders for Patterson Kelly. PK still makes them, Patterson Kelly on the V blenders. For years you’re right, we called them PK blenders. I’m gonna call them pant leg blenders. But they’re still very popular. They are. And you see them across industries. You see them pharma, you seem them in food, you see them in chemical. And because they’re beauties, they’re simplicity. There’s nothing that really can go wrong. Basically, you have a V in that situation of a V blender or you have a horizontal shaft with a helix around it in the case of a ribbon blender, it just rotates at a fairly slow speed and just blends product according to a—blends powders— according to a recipe or a certain time period. You put two powders in and at the end of four minutes of blending, you open up the discharge chute and you have one new blended product out. And the green clovers and the purple hearts are all mixed in with the rest. The Lucky Charms get mixed in with the cereal. That’s actually a great way to visualize it. I never thought about that, or the raisins in the Raisin Bran, I tell you. Well done! But that’s exactly what it does. And it is supposed to give you universal dispersion of certain products within powders. Right. Is that the technical term? And everybody uses them. And because they are able to be repurposed across several different industries , powder blenders have a high resale value at auction or the dealer network. They hold their value well? They hold their value very well. Everybody uses them. And there are not a lot of moving parts, which means that there’s not a lot of things that could have gone wrong. And they are, they are easy to move. So and they’re easy to repurpose. So powder blenders are probably after reactors or after tanks and then reactors, podwer blenders are probably our third largest category. You know, it is the type of product because everybody everybody that’s in the process would. Almost everybody uses them. They can be stainless. They could be carbon, they can be, are there any glass lined ribbon blenders? There are. There are glass lined. If you take a tumbling blender and put a jacket on it. Then they which you can do sometimes because you can dry in these as well. There are these blenders, that can have heating elements or cooling elements attached to the outside. And while they’re blending, they’re also being heated, which is drying them, driving off water. You see those sometimes glass lined, not that often, glass-lined are very popular. ‘Cause there aren’t that many on the secondary market because they don’t come on the market very often, they get snatched up very quickly. Like vintage cars. Good information. Talking with Gregg Epstein, president and CEO of Perry Videx. Gregg, thanks for your time today. Thanks for having me, Dave.