16 Inch Hand Sealing Machine

What comes with the extra length

A wide bag is usually also a heavy bag, and a heavy bag is usually also a thicker film. So a request for a longer bar is very often really a request for more heat and more dwell as well - and those are different limits.

The second thing is the machine itself. A long-bar machine takes a real amount of bench, and the operator has to be able to lay the whole width of the bag flat in front of it. A machine that will not fit the bench properly gets used at an angle, and a bag sealed at an angle seals badly.

The third is the operator. Holding a wide, full bag square with one hand is not realistic. At this length a foot-operated machine is usually the correct format rather than an upgrade.

When a band sealer is the better buy

Wide bags are often bulk bags, and bulk bags often come in runs. If you are sealing a batch of them at a time rather than one here and one there, a continuous band sealer is worth comparing before you commit to a long-bar bench machine.

A band sealer seals as the bag travels, so bag width stops being a bar-length question and becomes a conveyor question instead. For wide, heavy bags in runs that is usually the more comfortable machine to work with, and there are wide-conveyor models made for exactly this.

We will put both on the quotation if your description fits, rather than quoting only the one you asked for.

Where a heat seal may not be the answer at all

Not every wide bag needs sealing. A carton liner is very often folded and taped, or closed with a tie, and never sees a machine. A woven sack is stitched.

If you are looking at a long-bar sealer because that is how it has always been done, say what the bag actually is and what happens to it afterwards. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need this machine, and we would rather say it.

What to send for a quotation

The widest bag measured flat, the film and its thickness if you know it, the daily count, and whether the bags come in runs or singly. A photograph of the bag filled helps more than usual at this size.

From that we will tell you the seal length, the format, and whether a band sealer would serve you better than a longer bar.

What a wide bag does to your bench

A long-bar machine changes the bench around it, and that is worth measuring before the machine arrives rather than after.

The bag has to be laid out flat across its full width in front of the jaws. That means clear table on both sides of the machine, not just the footprint of the machine itself - and on most benches that space is currently holding something else.

The operator has to be able to reach the full width without walking. A wide bag pulled into position from one end arrives at the jaws skewed, and a skewed bag seals badly at one corner - which is exactly the failure people then blame on the machine.

And a wide filled bag has to be lifted onto the bench. If the product is heavy, the bench height matters more than anything on the specification sheet, because an operator lifting a heavy wide bag up to jaw height a few hundred times a day will not keep doing it.

Send us a photograph of the bench as it is now, along with the bag. It is a more useful piece of information at this size than the seal length.