Filleting the smallest fish
SEAC’s redeveloped SFD-300 for smaller fish.
It took SEAC AB three years to overhaul its ARENCO SFD-300 to fillet smaller fish from 25 to 50 fish per kg and the result – the ARENCO SFD-300 XS was installed in Sweden, Finland, Latvia and Croatia to work on Baltic herring, sardines, anchovies, vendance, red mullet and horse mackerel.
Capacity is up to 250 fish/min/four operators which the Swedish manufacturer pointed out is extremely favourable when compared with hand filleting’s 20 fish per minute.
Hot on the heels of this device, SEAC developed a belly cleaning device or ‘Kronsardine’ or ‘Delhi herring’ device for the XS machine giving the customer possibilities to produce both fillets and headed and gutted fish with belly opened in the same machine.
Now, following six months’ development, SEAC has introduced its SFD-300 XXS. This machine can fillet fish as small as 10g (about 10cm long) with both a good yield and a high capacity of up to 250 fish per minute.
The machine also can process fish that have been in marinade for up to two years.
The new XXS machine is quite a leap from the original SFD-300, but having already developed the XS it was not such a demanding task as before, said SEAC president Ulf Groenqvist.
Still, the new machine works along similar lines as the ARENCO SFD-300, which has been on the market for more than 50 years.
The ARENCO SFD-300 was designed during the 1950s and 60s following on from the earlier SFD-200 model. The machine was original designed for the filleting of sardines and was delivered to more than 1,000 customers throughout the world. Even today, SFD-300s can be found still in operation.
The ARENCO SFD-300 XXShas a round plastic infeed table with 70 fingers. Fish are placed on the infeed table where up to four operators take them and put them between the fingers with tail first and belly in the moving direction.
Fish are then moved by a brush to the tail cutting unit where the tail is cut off and a new brush forwards the fish to the head cutting unit. The infeed table then takes the fish to the infeed chute of the filleting part of the machine.
Here the fish are first gripped by two rubber belts that take the fish through the entire machine. The first station is the belly cutting where two horizontal knives cut the belly off. Then the fish are taken to the belly cleaning device where a cleaning wheel removes the guts. Finally, the fish arrive at the filleting station, where two finger packages, one on each side of the fish, hold them at an angle while filleting knives cut the belly and back bones away, delivering a butterfly fillet as end product.
Groenqvist said the new XXS is robust and probably the smallest filleting machine on the market. It also has “one more very important advantage”, he said. “To change the production from one size of fish to another takes just five minutes compared with hours on other similar machines on the market. Just take off the infeed table and put another one on the table – then make a small adjustment to the filleting machine and you are ready to produce smaller or bigger fish sizes.”
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