Detector rental finds missing machine piece for local water bottling company! Big Island Hawaii.

« Thinking Outside the Box »

We got a funny call for help the other day.
A water bottling company lost a nozzle used to fill their water bottles in one of their cases of water. It fell off the machine after a daily cleaning.
Not only was the stainless steel nozzle in one of the cases, it had certainly fallen INSIDE one of the water bottles which were now packaged and ready for delivery.
1680 CASES of water were being loaded onto the truck for international delivery when an engineer realized the piece had gone for a ride inside one of the bottles…
« Would our detector be able to the find a quarter-sized piece of stainless steel inside a water bottle? » was the first question we got on our call at 5pm.
An engineer did the 2 hour drive over the volcanos from Hilo to us here in Kona with a sample box of water containing a replicated ‘lost nozzle’ hidden in one of the bottles.
We switched on the detector and ran the detector’s coil over the box – a small blip – running over the side was a louder blip – then passing it under the box made a definitive BEEP! Made sense as the piece would have been sitting on the bottom of the bottle…
The engineer’s team as waiting for him – it would be a late night – so he raced back over the mountain and the employees started taking boxes off the 24 palettes – a total of 1680 cases of water, each holding 12 large water bottles. Phew! A clever employee rigged the detector’s coil so boxes of unopened water could be put atop the now upside-down coil.
After 10 palettes (700 cases) of passing boxes of water bottles on and off the detector – a definitive BEEP! Ripping the case open, sure enough, the missing piece of the machine was FOUND!
Great detective work – a real case of thinking outside the box to solve a problem – and glad we could have been of help with our humble metal detector!