Orbital Wrapping Blows Away Manual Banding

Bob Hunter felt a hint of apprehension almost every time he shipped an order to a customer. As branch manager for operations at Ta Chen International, Inc. (Houston, TX), he manages the comings and goings of more than one million pounds of stainless steel per day for the master distributor of stainless, aluminum and nickel alloy coils, sheets, plates, long products, tubes and fittings. Since one rejected shipment could cost the company tens of thousands of dollars, his staff typically took extra precautions to prevent any damage, such as using “huge” amounts of plastic film to wrap palletized cartons and applying metal or plastic banding for extra confidence.

“It’s critical for our customers that every product arrives on spec, secure and intact,” says Hunter. Then he saw on a plant tour how another metals company handled its packaging. “I watched their forklift drivers take the loaded pallets to a new kind of orbital wrapping machine and it was wrapping the entire load to the pallet automatically while the pallet was on the forklift,” recalls Hunter. “They loved it, they showed me how easy it is to operate and I had to have one for our plant.” The machine he saw is the Wrapper Tornado from TAB Industries, LLC (Reading, PA). The orbital wrapper automatically wraps plastic stretch film 360 deg around and under an entire pallet load to create a unitized, secure load that also protects the cartons from weather, warehousing and transportation operations.

The Wrapper Tornado has eliminated the need for manual wrapping and banding, made a turntable wrapper obsolete and cut the time involved in wrapping each pallet load from two to three minutes to 30 seconds while allowing one person to handle the process instead of two people and savings thousands in material costs. “Financially, this orbital wrapper paid for itself in a little more than a year,” notes Hunter. “But most importantly, it does an outstanding job securing our product to the pallet and it has really made our lives easier.”

TAB Industries, LLC, 2525 North 12th Street, Reading PA 19605, 610-921-0012, [email protected], www.tabwrapper.com.