Fabrication
While walking through your cellar you give little thought to how your tanks were fabricated, assembled or the type of welding procedures used to make them. Your main concern is sanitation and leaks. For instance, a rougher more porous weld can add time, money and labor costs to sanitize your tanks.
At MCS we use a computer-driven welding system for fabrication. This type of welding greatly reduces porosity and roughness. This provides you with a cleaner, stronger, better-looking tank. Our welds are smaller-sized but have deeper penetration into the parent material. This makes our weld zone cleaner and stronger than the standard mig weld. We autorotate our tanks. This makes for one continuous weld, eliminating starts and stops, which are the main cause of contamination and leaks.
After the welds are completed, they are cleaned. MCS does not use a mechanical method of cleaning that may impart carbon steel or contaminants into the weld zone. Our CGWS also cleans the weld zone by passing the weld head over the weld again. A ray (yes sir, a ray) strips off less than a hair diameter in thickness off the shell of the tank. This eliminates dis- coloration and contamination from the weld zone.
You may also observe MCS’s sections are assembled differently. We use a technique that dairy tank producers use to assemble their tanks. This offers two weld profiles that can be assembled with your needs and visual expectations in mind.
To ensure and maintain our quality we keep our stainless-steel shop separate from our carbon steel shop. This keeps carbon dust, grindings and torch waste from contaminating our stainless-steel tanks. After each section is cut, we add a layer of PVC film to further reduce contact with contaminates.
Design
MCS will make your tanks in the way you would like them to function. If you have an idea to assist in cap management of reds or a cooling profile you would like for your whites, tell us your needs and we will work with you to accomplish them. We don’t perform miracles but will advise you of the functionality and coast effectiveness of your request.
At this time MCS does not produce our own manways. We do source both the European and the more heavy-duty California style manways. We are currently working with a metal forming company on a design for a stouter rectangular manway in larger sizes. At the time of this writing, we are working with an automated welding system company to build a proprietary dimple machine. The system is designed to work 50% faster than current dimple lines while using 85% less energy to manufacture your tanks heat exchange capabilities.
About Us
MCS is a locally owned company and headquartered on the central coast of California. Our management team has over 50 years of experience supplying wineries. We have an abundant knowledge in your cooperage needs. Mike has supplied wineries with bottles, corks, barrels, crush pad equipment and tanks throughout his career. He is best known for the fabrication and design of stainless steel wine tanks. We work to have an ethical environment for both our clients and our staff.
We set out to make a better wine tank using new and improved methods and technologies currently implemented in the wine industry. We have achieved a great deal of our goals. A more sanitary weld zone, adding strength to the tank (earth quake the big ones coming), less time-consuming cleaning of welds and a faster, safer assembly method. Our unintentional improvements include the use of a welding gas that can be effectively taken from the atmosphere, reducing trips to the welding gas supplier. The dimple machine using far less amount of energy. We have reduced our carbon foot print.
After all that we invite you to contact our team to discuss current or future needs for state-of-the-art stainless steel wine tanks.