Packaging machines for Kochi

Salt air, and what it reaches

Coastal air carries salt, and salt reaches everything that is not painted, plated or wiped. It is slow, it is invisible for months, and then a machine is stiff and a fastener will not turn.

Two habits deal with most of it. Wipe down and lightly oil exposed metal on a schedule rather than when it looks bad, and keep machines away from an open shutter on the seaward side where the floor allows it.

It reaches your goods too. Bare steel parts packed without protection in this city arrive marked, and the mark appears after despatch rather than before it, which is why it is usually blamed on the transporter.

Where metal goods are packed here, VCI paper or film is not a luxury. It is the difference between a part that arrives clean and one that arrives with an argument attached.

Distributing what somebody else made

A large share of the packing work in this city is repacking: bulk arrives from outside the state, is broken down, and goes out again to dealers along the coast and into the hills.

That produces a specific set of problems, and none of them is solved by a bigger machine:

• The original carton was designed for the journey it has already made, not for the one you are about to send it on.
• Half-filled cartons lose the support their contents were giving the walls, and collapse under the next box in the stack.
• Old markings left on a reshipped carton send it to the wrong dealer eventually.
• Monsoon storage softens board that was specified for a dry warehouse, so a stack height that worked in January will not hold in July.

Export, and the pack that leaves by sea

Seafood, spice, coir and rubber leave this port in volume, and each of them punishes a different weakness.

Cold-chain goods defeat ordinary adhesive — tape applied at room temperature and then chilled lets go, and the carton opens in a container nobody will look inside for weeks. Use tape rated for the temperature and apply it at the temperature it will live at.

Spice and rubber carry odour that transfers to anything sharing a pallet. Separate at pallet level rather than at carton level; film holds the smell in with the goods rather than keeping it away from the neighbours.

The estate page for Kalamassery covers the machine-level detail for both of these trades.

Wet floors and the equipment that has to work on them

Seafood, rubber and food units wash their floors, and floors that are washed are floors that slope to a drain.

A turntable wrapper needs a level floor. On a sloped one the load leans a little more with every turn, and the pallet that failed in transit failed on your own floor first.

A pallet truck on a wet floor is a wheel-choice question, and the wrong wheel makes a loaded truck steer the operator instead of the reverse.

Tell us the floor with the enquiry — washed down, sloped, sealed or bare. It changes the recommendation more than the tonnage does.

A long line from Faridabad

This is one of the longer road moves we make, and we would rather set out what that means than let you find out.

Many buyers here use a transporter they already work with; tell us and the machine is handed over packed and ready.

Hold the wearing parts locally — gripper, cutter and heating element on a strapping machine, the blade on a carton sealer. At this distance that shelf is what decides whether a fault costs an hour or a fortnight.

What to send with an enquiry

Carton or load dimensions, weight, quantity an hour, and whether the goods are chilled, washed down, exported or distributed inland.

Those last four words change the answer completely, and they are the ones nobody thinks to include.

Where the honest answer is that you need better cartons and tape rather than a machine, the quotation will say so.