Fully Automatic Strapping Machines

A fully automatic strapping machine is the answer to one particular problem: cartons are arriving faster than a person can pick them up, place them in an arch and put them down again. On an inline machine the carton never leaves the conveyor. It travels into the arch, the strap is fed round it, tensioned, sealed and cut, and the carton carries on to the next station. Nobody handles it in between.

That makes this range the right one at the end of a line that runs for most of a shift - a bottling or filling line, a corrugated box plant, an FMCG packing hall, a courier or e-commerce sortation bench where the same carton shape comes past all day. It is the wrong range for a packing table where a few dozen cartons are strapped between other jobs; a semi automatic machine costs a fraction of it and will not sit idle.

The saving is in labour and in consistency. Strap tension is set on the machine rather than judged by an operator, so every carton on the pallet is strapped the same, and a load that is strapped the same all the way through is a load that arrives without the top layer loose.

Choosing the right one

Three things decide which machine in this range suits you, and all three are about your line rather than the machine. The first is the arch. The arch has to clear the tallest and widest carton you strap, and an arch that is much larger than your carton wastes strap and cycle time on every pass, so it is sized to the range you actually run, not to the biggest box you have ever packed.

The second is the conveyor. Infeed and outfeed heights have to match what is already in the line, or you are building transfer sections to bridge a difference of a few inches. Send us the height of the belt either side and the direction of travel and the machine is quoted to drop into that gap.

The third is how the strap is placed. One strap down the centre, two straps, or a cross pattern changes the machine's cycle and sometimes the model. Tell us how your carton is strapped today and whether that is what you want to keep doing.

What this range will not do

An automatic arch machine strapping does not hold a load together that is not already stable. If your carton bulges, or the flaps are not sealed, or the stack on the pallet is leaning, strapping tightens onto a bad shape and can crush the top edge. The fix is upstream - carton sealing, or a stretch wrapper for the pallet - not more tension.

It also does not strap loads that cannot travel through an arch: coils, bundles of pipe, timber, and anything strapped where it stands. Those are pneumatic tool work.

And it does not replace a stretch wrapper. Strapping holds a carton or a bundle closed; it does not restrain a palletised stack against sideways movement in a truck.