Quick guide: components for industrial packaging machines

The quality of the components you choose will play an important part in the life of your packaging equipment. Your packaging machine parts might rely on everything from cable ties and PCB mounting hardware to clamping levers and screw-on rubber bumper feet.

Choose your components wisely and you can deliver a semi-automated or automated packaging machine that performs for years.

This guide is designed to help you make those choices. We’ll focus on three types of packaging machines, but most of the components shown for each can be used on all machines, such as steel packing machine, cardboard box packing machines, carton wrapping machines, and sheet packing machines.

Free samples and CAD downloads

To make your job easier, we’ve made available free samples on most of our solutions, so you can try before you buy. You can also download free CADs of our solutions to help with designing your project.

Strapping machine components

Sometimes called banding strapping machines, they tension, seal and cut the strapping in one motion.

Your design will depend on the strapping demand. Whether your application will be a pallet strapping machine, box strapping machine or another type, consider the recommendations below, which are ideal for semi-automatic or automatic strapping machines.

Where relevant, the components you use should not only help the machine’s performance but contribute to health and safety, so consider insert glides and recessed handles.

Your strapping machine also needs protecting. Use caps and plugs to protect critical profiles from damage during handling and transportation. You can also get a professional finish by using high-temperature masking for holes and contact points with easy-to-fit caps and plugs.

Steel pipe stacking machine, also called stackers, are the most important lifting and transportation equipment in a three-dimensional warehouse and a symbol that represents the characteristics of a three-dimensional warehouse.

The main function of the stacking crane is to move back and forth in the aisle of the three-dimensional warehouse, store the goods at the entrance of the roadway into the compartment of the shelf, or take out the goods in the compartment and transport it to the entrance of the roadway.

The early stacker cranes hung a mast (column) on the lifting trolley of the bridge crane, and used the up and down movement of the fork on the column and the rotation of the column to carry goods, usually called the bridge stacker. Roadway stackers appeared in the United States around 1960. This stacker uses ground rails to prevent tipping. Since then, with the development of computer control technology and automated three-dimensional warehouses, stackers have become more and more widely used, with better technical performance and higher heights. Today, the height of the stacker can reach 40 meters. In fact, if it is not restricted by warehouse construction and cost, the height of the stacker can be higher.

What is strapping?

Strapping is the process of applying a steel or plastic strap around a product or pallet to bundle, reinforce, or attach it to something. This is done using a strapping machine (banding machine) such as steel belt strapping machine or strapping tool. Strapping machines can be divided into semi-automatic strapping machines, (fully) automatic strapping machines and pallet strapping machines. Strapping tools can be divided into hand strapping tools and battery & pneumatic strapping tools.

The purpose of strapping products is to transport and / or store them quickly and undamaged in an efficient and safe manner.

How does strapping work?

The strapping band is applied horizontally or vertically around the product, with the ends of the strapping material coming together. A strapping tool or strapping machine connects these ends after the correct tension has been applied. A strapping tool or strapping machine closes the strapping band using a seal or buckle, or by welding the ends together. After this, the excess strapping band is cut automatically.

All materials, sizes and shapes can be strapped.

Applications of strapping

Examples of concrete applications of strapping are:

Closing boxes and shipping containers

Bundling for handling and shipping: e.g., newspapers, pipes, wood or concrete blocks

Attaching or securing products to pallets and crates

Reinforce wooden boxes, cardboard boxes and crates

Attach items to flat wagons or flatbed trailers

Securing a unit load such as bricks or flat glass

Keep rolls of steel or paper together

Lifting assistance with for example roof tiles or newspapers

Theft protection: it can be seen immediately if the strapping band has been removed

Why a Reliable Strapping System Is a Key Part of Successful Automatic Systems

In today’s manufacturing facilities, typically half of production hours rely on the use of manual or physical labor. Reducing your dependency on manual work through automation has the potential to increase your revenue and efficiency. It speeds up repetitive tasks and allows your workers to focus on other things. If you want to optimize your use of equipment, consider which processes are most apt for automation.

Your machines should speed up labor-intensive processes without high maintenance and energy costs. Investing in a high-quality strapping system is one of the best automation decisions you can make because it offers many benefits. Here are seven ways steel stacking and strapping machine line will improve your efficient:

1. Greater Efficiency

There are many reasons to automate your equipment — from decreasing labor costs to reducing human error. A reliable strapping system for your manufacturing plant can resolve these inefficiencies while also boosting performance in critical areas.

Energy Efficiency

A reliable strapping machine can improve energy efficiency by eliminating heat from the sealing process. EAM-Mosca Corporation’s ultrasonic sealers do not use continuous heat. Instead, our innovative solution utilizes ultrasonic waves to produce a molecular level seal in the strap. As a result, the machine only requires energy when the seal forms, greatly reducing the energy consumed in the sealing process.

Material Efficiency

Using an automated strapping system, your facility will use less banding material. When employees strap packages or bundles by hand, they tend to overestimate the strap length. If you band containers of varying sizes, it is harder to gauge the amount of strap needed consistently.

An automated strapping system will self-calibrate for any bundle dimensions and cut and seal the exact amount of strap needed. Plus, it can make this estimation in a split second, much faster than manual banding. As a result, you’ll experience less material waste and a faster process.

The technology can further improve material efficiency because an ultrasonic seal is more consistent than a heat seal. Very often, you can select a narrower, or thinner and thus less expensive strap and get the same or better performance. It can seal both Polypropylene (PP) and Polyester (PET) bands and switch between them with minor adjustments to use the most efficient material for any bundle or load.

We’ve saved some of our customers 100 feet of strapping per coil when they switched to our sealing technology – footage that adds up to significant cost savings.

2. Improved Safety

In general, automation has the power to keep the workplace safer by keeping workers away from dangerous processes. Since 2003, workplace safety incidents have gone from five per 100 full-time employees to around 2.8 in 2019, a figure that has held steady over several years. Many experts point to a correlation between a reduction in workplace injuries to an increase in automation.

Manual strapping presents opportunities for safety hazards. Manual strapping requires a small team engaged in repetitive motions. An automated machine requires just one operator who can stay out of the banding mechanism’s direct line. By removing manual, repetitive motions, you can also create an ergonomically correct environment with fewer muscle-strains. This environment decreases fatigue, allowing your team to stay alert and less likely to get injured. The possibility of tripping hazards is greatly reduced with automatic equipment as well.

The sealing technology can also improve safety over traditional automatic strapping systems. Unlike heat sealing systems, the ultrasonic system produces no smoke, fumes, or odors.

3. Lower Maintenance Costs

The more reliable your automated equipment is, the less often it needs to be maintained. The longer you can stretch the service life of individual parts, the lower their lifetime cost. EAM-Mosca Corporation’s strapping machines reduce your maintenance costs with reliable equipment designed to reduce wear.

Mosca’s strapping systems with sealing technology feature wear-free DC brushless direct drives. Many of the components are designed to create less wear, such as its sealed bearings, which block dust and debris. And ultrasonic sealing creates no residues like heat-sealing does, which also reduces maintenance. The result of all these innovations is an efficient machine that can run longer with fewer repairs.

Another area that contributes to your maintenance costs is the loss of productivity during upkeep or failures. While prolonging the time between repairs helps to lessen these costs, we take things even further. Our system can be disassembled without the use of tools and a head replacement takes only 30 seconds.

We also make it easy to change out the strap coil. The machine senses the empty coil and ejects any leftover strap from the feed. The equipment is then ready for a new coil to be loaded, saving time and material. We were able to reduce one of our client’s coil change time from four minutes to two minutes when we installed machines. With fast, user-friendly maintenance features, your plant can get back to production in record time.

4. Enhanced Productivity

An efficient, automated system improves your plant’s productivity in many vital ways. By using equipment that can do rote tasks faster and more affordably, your team can focus on more skill-intensive tasks. That benefit is undoubtedly the case for automatic strapping machines, which have the functionality to band up to 50 items per minute, depending on the application.

Manual strapping requires a small team to keep pace with your production lines. An automatic strapping machine needs just one worker to feed packages or bundles for banding. You can even combine it with a conveyor belt system, which can strap items one after the next at a faster rate. Choose from strapping system conveyors and turners built for high volume or adjustable speeds.

With so much of the strapping process happening by machine, your workers are freed up for other jobs. What you do with that extra labor can further enhance your productivity. Use that spare time to upskill your workers to form an elite team. Or, move them to delicate aspects of the process that still require a personal touch and critical thinking. When your workers get to focus on more diverse tasks, they are more engaged and productive in their work. You also get the benefit of putting talented workers where they’ll be most effective. With fewer repetitive tasks, they’ll be less fatigued, less likely to get hurt, and more effective.

Another benefit of our technology is that it can handle varying strapping tensile strengths and load sizes. Some bundles, such as soft cloth or thin stacks of paper, need a looser band to prevent damage to the machine product. Others, like heavy pallets and boxes ready for shipping, need a tighter, heavier duty strap to keep items in place. The system can handle all these jobs on the same machine. All you have to do is set the tension required.

Furthermore, many facilities need reliable strapping for different sized packages. Our strapping systems self-calibrates to the size of the bundle or load passing through. By tracking the parameters, it automatically cuts the amount of strap needed to secure it. You can send items of varying sizes through the conveyor without having to adjust the settings.