Reel and Roll Handling
Safe roll handling, from bags to banknotes Steve Weston, managing director, Weston Handling
F
rom wrappers to labels, from bags to banknotes and from boxes to drinks cartons, all the way through manufacture, printing, laminating and cutting to size, paper and
plastic fi lm is handled in reels and rolls. Even the paper and plastic money you buy goods with is produced in reel form.
The terms reel and roll are generally
interchangeable, but for the purpose of this article, we will class “reels” as big rolls requiring powered lifting equipment and “rolls” as small rolls, typically capable of being manhandled.
Estimates vary, but the global fl exible packaging industry is reckoned to be worth around US$230 billion. Virtually every piece of fl exible packaging you have ever seen has been handled many times in reel and then roll form.
Since the late 70’s, when I worked for over seven years as a technician in Papermaking R&D, I have been involved in handling reels and rolls of all sizes. For the last around 30 years, I have been designing and selling reel and roll handling solutions for the global fl exible packaging industries, where the manual handling of smaller rolls, in the region of 10-50kg, has
been an area of concern, as the impact of repetitive strain injuries has become better understood. Often, to be fully eff ective, they need to be tailored to a particular application.
Handling aides are often sought and bought in an attempt to make the burden of repetitive handling less harmful. However, many times I have seen one manual handling problem eagerly replaced with a piece of equipment that goes on to causes a diff erent problem. An example of this might be the introduction of a push-around stacker truck to carry a number of rolls. A rise and fall platform or core boom pole might make the transferring of the rolls from one part of the production cycle to another easier, but the physical sideways twisting that the operators often used to steer the truck can put undue stress on the lower back and arms. One of the most diffi cult areas in handling rolls within converting plants is the slitter rewindbecause it is often the case that many smaller rolls have to be unloaded from the rewind shaft horizontally to be transferred and stacked on a pallet with the core vertical, possibly via an unload tree. Prime examples of these types of rolls are the labels for cans and bottles, which are often in the region of 10-30kg, and have to be manhandled off the horizontal pole, turned through 90° and laid onto the pallet. However, physics plays its part in injuries here because strain on the operator is not just caused by the weight of the roll, as the momentum of the movement is added when the operator slows the roll down to place it down gently and accurately. It is often at this point that the operator is also twisting. A solution is to use dedicated Slitter Unload Trucks, (SUT’s). They are designed to take multiple rolls directly from the rewind shafts or unload tree shafts and rotate the complete stack of rolls from horizontal to vertical. Some utilise gripping shafts which can be rotated to vertical, the rolls then being palletised as a stack and the gripping shaft then withdrawn vertically from the stack.
Others extract the stack of rolls horizontally from the unload tree shafts in a ‘V’ Cradle, which can then be rotated to vertical, allowing a single roll or complete stack to be lifted onto a pallet using a Vertical Roll Lifter, (VRL), that is mounted on either a separate overhead crane or a crane boom built onto the truck.
By utilising using SUT’s and VRL’s to extract multiple rolls, turn them to vertical and stack them on pallets, manual handling stress can be virtually eliminated.
32
October 2024
www.convertermag.com
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