Marden Edwards Journal

Marden Edwards Group company, Wraps UK, has just completed the first model in a brand new range of two reel sleevewrappers. The AS75 has been sold to a major UK packaged tea supplier for shrink wrapping shelf ready trays of tea leaf cartons. The tea is either in a 6 or 12 pack plastic tray which is automatically fed through the film web by conveyor.

The AS75 is the latest generation of sleeve wrapper produced by Wraps UK. Drawing on over twenty years of machine building experience, the AS75 incorporates many improvements incorporated through listening to the needs of customers. Manufactured in Wraps UK’s Wimborne factory, the AS75 is more robust than ever before but is still easy to move around the production floor if required.

Improvements include a high level, easy access perimeter guarding system for great safety and machine visibility. Machine control and diagnostics are via an ergonomically positioned LCD display which allows the operator unprecedented control over the wrapping process. Both film reels are now mounted after the film sealing jaw enabling simple and speedy film thread up.

Improvements with both the pneumatics and machine controls mean that it is suitable for production rates greater than 20 products per minute. The thicker, folded frame is extremely strong making the machine very smooth in operation. The solid knife sealing jaw has been extended enabling film widths of up to 700mm to be used.

The AS75, in combination with one of Wraps UK manufactured heat shrink tunnels, provides a low cost but high performance shrink wrapping packaging system.

Marden Edwards has recently supplied three of it’s latest LX125RH automatic collating and wrapping machines to a customer in Russia. The machines were required to replace existing machinery which had been wrapping in paper. The Marden Edwards overwrappers are designed to wrap in both clear and printed film thereby providing the customer with a significant cost saving over the previous wrapping style.

The popularity of wrapping 200s packs of cigarettes in clear or printed film is increasing rapidly. The cost savings when compared to cartons or paper can justify a machine payback in less than 12 weeks based on single shift running. The annual savings can be many hundreds of thousands of Euros.

The LX125RH machines supplied were wrapping “soft cup packs” at a line speed of 500 individual packs per minute. These were collated into 10s and then overwrapped at a line speed of 50 wrapped collations per minute.

Because the individual cigarette pack is soft, a number of systems were employed to ensure the smooth running of the machine. An “S” band conveyor was used which enables a large amount of product to be contained in a small area whilst at the same time removes much of the back pressure which can damage the product.

At the infeed to the collating unit, a mechanically operated feed conveyor positively drove the packs into the collating area. The collator itself was a continuous motion system that instead of stacking up to form the bundle instead “drop stacked” the packs downwards into the path of the transfer pusher that transferred the collation into the wrapping machine.

This style of collator meant that the cigarette packs were handled gently at all times without damage to the product despite the high speed of operation. The resulting machine was very compact and well able to integrate into the existing production line with little modification to the position of the existing machinery.