Packing and handling for Makarpura GIDC

The single heavy object

A transformer or a large panel is crated, bolted down inside the crate, and lifted by sling or by fork. There is no carton, no pallet stack and nothing for a wrapper to turn.

What holds it is the bolting and the crate, and that is a fabrication job rather than a packaging one. We are not going to pretend otherwise in order to quote.

Where strap does appear on work like this, it is round the crate rather than round the goods, and it is applied with a pneumatic strapping tool at a tension no hand reaches. The tool's performance depends on your air supply — line pressure and available flow — and an underperforming tool is almost always an air problem.

For the accessories that travel with a large item — bushings, fittings, oil, spares — the packing is ordinary carton and pallet work, and it is where most of the damage claims on these consignments actually come from.

Oil, and the drums that come with it

Transformer and switchgear work moves insulating oil in drums, and it moves it into areas where a spill is expensive rather than merely messy.

A drum carrier and lifter with a working safety lock takes the tipping point out of the lift. Where drums are decanted rather than moved sealed, the attachment and the geometry are different — say which you do, because buying the lifting-only version and discovering it later is a common mistake.

Capacity is quoted against a full steel drum. If drums are handled warm, say so; a warm drum's contents move more and the grip behaves differently.

Documentation, and what an EPC customer asks for

A great deal of Makarpura's output goes to project customers and EPC contractors, and their paperwork requirements reach the packing.

What is usually asked for is a packing list that matches the crate, a photograph at despatch, and a record of how the load was secured. None of that needs special equipment, and all of it is easier when the strap tension is a number on a machine rather than a judgement in somebody's hands.

Ask for the machine's datasheet with the quotation. Your quality department will want it in the file, and it is easier to obtain once than twice.

The site that receives it, not the one that ships it

Packing for a substation, a plant site or a project store is decided by what is available at the far end, and that is rarely a loading dock.

A skid that a forklift can take at your gate may have to come off a trailer at site with a hydra and a couple of slings. Fork pockets on two sides only, or lifting points that were never meant to carry the whole assembly, are how a good pack gets damaged in the last hundred metres of a journey.

Ask your customer how it will be unloaded before the crate is designed. Where the answer is a crane, the marking matters as much as the timber - a sling position marked on the outside is read; one written in the packing list is not.

For the smaller items that travel with the main equipment, ordinary sealing and strapping apply, and keeping those cartons on the same pallet as the crate saves more at site than it does in freight.