Industries We Serve

A corrugator runs hot, fast and without stopping. Board moves through the machine at hundreds of metres a minute, and the heat, glue and moisture all have to stay in balance for the flutes to bond and the sheet to come out flat. When one part of that chain drifts, you see it straight away in warped board, weak joints and scrap.

The converting side adds its own pressure. Printers, die-cutters and folder-gluers have to stay in register and keep pace with the corrugator feeding them. A fault anywhere backs up the whole line, so the equipment has to be looked after before it fails rather than after.

Two-piece can lines run at a pace that leaves almost no margin. Bodymakers draw and iron thousands of cans a minute, and the tooling works to tolerances measured in microns. A small amount of wear or misalignment shows up quickly as split cans, thin walls or a jammed line.

Everything downstream has to stay in step with that throughput. Washers, coaters, printers and neckers run in sequence, and the control systems tying them together cannot carry long stops. Keeping the line synchronised and the tooling in good order is most of the work.

Three-piece cans are built rather than pressed, so the line has more stages that can go wrong. The body is formed and welded, the ends are stamped and seamed on, and the can may be coated inside. Each step has to hold its settings, because a weak weld or a loose seam is a failed can.

Seal integrity is not negotiable in food packaging, which puts maintenance and calibration at the centre of the operation. Welders, seamers and coating lines need regular checks to stay within spec and meet the standards a food plant works to.