Food and beverage manufacturers face unique challenges in ensuring precision, hygiene, and reliability in their equipment. Ruland’s shaft collars and rigid couplings are engineered and manufactured to meet the demanding needs of food processing, packaging, and handling systems, offering solutions that enhance efficiency and reduce downtime.  Rigid couplings from Ruland are available in a wide variety of sizes and styles to suit the needs of food packaging applications such as case erectors, cartoners, and form, fill, seal equipment. These couplings are ideal for shaft-to-shaft connections and precise servo driven applications as they do not introduce misalignment, vibration, or bearing noise into the system. They have precision honed bores, anti-vibration hardware, and opposing hardware on two-piece styles to ensure superior fit, alignment and holding power. Ruland offers 303 stainless steel couplings with hardware of like material as standard stock items. Proprietary Nypatch anti-vibration hardware is used to prevent galling, provide event seating of the screw, and allow for repeated screw installations. Rigid couplings are offered in one- and two-piece clamp styles with or without keyways in bore sizes ranging from 3 mm to 50 mm. Custom dimensions, inch to metric step bore combinations, and 316 stainless steel are available by request.  Clamp style shaft collars in food processing, packaging, and handling equipment are commonly used for guiding, spacing, stopping, mounting and component alignment. Food equipment manufacturers benefit from the tightly controlled face to bore perpendicularity of Ruland shaft collars (TIR of ≤ 0.05 mm) which is critical when they are used as a load bearing face or for aligning components such as bearings or gears. All Ruland shaft collars are machined to a fine burr free finish that reduces the likelihood of metallic system contamination and complements or enhances the appearance of food processing equipment. Shaft collars made from 303 and 316 stainless steel utilize hardware of like material for consistent corrosion resistance and to meet regulatory standards. Plastic shaft collars can be used as a cost-effective alternative to stainless steel at the expense of performance. They are supplied with stainless steel hardware for corrosion resistance. Ruland also offers anodized aluminum shaft collars with stainless steel hardware for areas of the system where stainless steel or plastic is not required. Shaft collars are manufactured in bore sizes from 3 mm to 150 mm. Ruland shaft collars and rigid couplings are RoHS3, REACH, and Conflict Minerals compliant. They are made from North American bar stock sourced from select mills and carefully manufactured in Ruland’s advanced manufacturing facility in Marlborough, Massachusetts, under strict controls using proprietary processes.