Packaging machines for Kochi and Kalamassery

Cold, and what it does to a carton and a tape

A shipper that is packed warm and stored cold does two things people do not expect. The board takes up moisture from the air in the chill room, and the tape adhesive loses tack at low temperature.

A seal that was sound at packing opens in the chill room, and it is found when the pallet is moved rather than when it fails. If your sealing complaints follow the cold chain rather than the season, that is the cause.

Two answers, neither of them a bigger machine. Use a tape rated for the temperature it will actually see, and strap the shipper as well as sealing it — a strap does not care about adhesive.

Board that has softened in a chill room also stacks badly, which is a straps-and-stack-height question rather than a carton-strength one.

Seafood and the primary pack

The pack that touches the product is where a seafood exporter's requirements are strictest, and it is where we have to be clear about what we supply.

Vacuum packaging, filling, capping and labelling machines are PackForge models, which PackForge Industries supplies, installs and looks after in service. What we build ourselves is a different group: the strapping, carton sealing, stretch wrapping and material handling machines.

For a Kalamassery export plant that must keep records of its equipment, knowing that difference is worth more than any broad promise. Put your questions in the enquiry and each reply is tied to the clause of your standard it answers — and no certificate we do not have will be claimed.

Wet floors, and the equipment that has to work on them

A seafood or spice processing floor is washed down, sloped to a drain and wet for most of a shift. Two things follow.

A slope defeats a turntable. The turntable has to rotate on dead-level ground, and a floor deliberately graded towards a drainage channel cannot give it that. Normally the fix is to lay a flat plinth for the wrapper rather than choose another machine — civil work that should be scheduled ahead of delivery.

Wet floors and wheels do not always agree. When a loaded pallet truck skids it is a hazard, not just a nuisance. Describe the floor surface and whether it gets hosed, and we will recommend the right wheel, along with where each machine is best placed in relation to the wash-down zone.

Should the machine itself get hosed along with the floor, let us know, because that calls for another specification — something to settle when you first enquire rather than learn about weeks later from a fault that comes and goes.

Rubber, and a pack that sticks to itself

Beyond the seafood and spice units, much of this belt's output is rubber - sheet, crumb, mats, and moulded parts - and rubber behaves in the pack like no other product covered here.

It sticks to itself under its own weight, and warm sheet stacked tight is a single block by the time it reaches a customer. Interleaving is the answer, not film. Wrapping a stack harder makes the blocking worse rather than better, which is the opposite of the rule that holds for almost every other load.

Where rubber goods are palletised, film is doing one job only: keeping the stack on the pallet. Set the force low, wrap the outside, and leave the layers to the interleaving.

Moulded parts in cartons are ordinary work - seal and strap - with one caution: a warm part packed straight off the press will sweat inside a sealed carton.