Packaging machines for Ambattur Industrial Estate

Equipping a floor that was not designed for this

An older estate unit has columns in inconvenient places, a floor that has been repaired more than once, and a door that was sized for what the unit made in 1985.

None of that stops a machine going in, but all of it decides which machine. A turntable stretch wrapper needs a clear circle and a level patch; a bench strapper needs neither. Where the floor is not level, a turntable will not run true, and that is a civil job before it is a machine purchase.

Send a photograph of the space and the route into it, not the dimensions of the room. Columns, door width and the turn at the top of a ramp are what actually rule machines in or out, and none of them appears in a floor area.

For most Ambattur units the honest answer is bench machines plus good trolleys rather than a palletised line, and we will say so.

Sheet metal and fabrication: awkward before it is heavy

Fabricated work is rarely a box. It is a shape, and the packing question is how to hold several of them together without them marking each other.

Strapping does that where the shape allows a strap round it, and a pneumatic strapping tool is what reaches a shape no arch will take. Corner protection is what stops the strap marking a finished surface, and it costs very little compared with a rejected consignment.

Where the parts are painted or plated, interleaving matters more than the strap. Two finished faces in contact under a strap will mark each other however carefully the strap is applied, and no machine setting prevents it.

Buying practically at distance

Chennai is a long haul from Faridabad, and delivery is still free. Prices exclude GST.

What makes the distance manageable is unglamorous: keep the two or three wear parts that stop a bench machine on your own shelf, and call rather than write when something is wrong.

For an older unit, ask for the datasheet with the quotation. The utility requirement and the footprint are what your electrician and your fabricator will need, and getting them once is easier than getting them twice.

It is also worth asking for the utility figures before you commit to a position on the floor. Moving a machine three metres after the point has been run is a day's work and an argument; deciding it on a drawing is neither.

And if the unit is rented, check what the landlord allows to be fixed to the floor. It is not a question anybody thinks to ask until a wrapper needs anchoring.

Second-hand machines, and what we will and will not do

An older estate has an active market in used equipment, and buyers here ask us about it more than anywhere else on this site.

We sell new machines. That is the straight answer, and it is not a sales line — we have no way to stand behind a machine whose history we do not know.

What we will do is supply the wear parts for a used machine where they are ours to supply. Send a photograph of the part and of the machine plate and we will tell you honestly whether ours fits. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not, and we will say which.

What we will also do is tell you when a used machine is the sensible purchase. A shop packing forty cartons a day does not need a new inline machine, and a supplier who says otherwise is selling rather than advising.