Horizontal Cartoner/Horizontal Sleever - Efficiency and Repeatability

Automated carton wrapping relieves staff of tedious, repetitive, and onerous manual sleeving tasks. Human error is eliminated, human injury is prevented, and throughput is greatly improved. Automating carton wrap operations guarantees packaging quality and repeatability – and a well-presented product is a saleable product. The KCS-120 carton wrapper (sleever) sequence is a carefully timed series of events accomplished via the harmonized use of several pieces of automated equipment. The wrappers themselves – the sleeves – are introduced to the carton wrapper operation from a magazine by a rotating pick arm equipped with suction cups. A vibrator assists in single-sleeve removal from the bottom of the stack. Once singulation is achieved, the pick arm rotates and lowers to place the sleeve in the correct orientation on the product (cup) pallet. At sleeve placement, the hole configuration of the sleeve matches the hole configuration of the Carton Wrapping Machine pallet. Following cup placement into the palletized sleeves, the sleeve folding/gluing sequence begins at forward conveyor motion. A deflector with a sloping nose forces the sleeve flaps together when the conveyor moves downstream. The sleeve is folded up along its lower crease lines by guides, also at downstream conveyor motion. Guides located further down the conveyor line start the upper folding operation of the carton wrapping machine along the upper carton crease while the glue assembly simultaneously applies glue to the sleeve. A conveyor-mounted pusher bar assists in folding. The pusher also aligns the sleeve firmly and evenly against the two lower cups inside the sleeve. A conveyor-mounted shoe also assists in upper sleeve folding, while simultaneously aligning the carton against the two upper cups inside each sleeve. Sleeving is now complete, perfectly and in a fraction of the time an operator could perform the task. The fully wrapped 4-packs are automatically picked and placed to the center conveyor for transfer to downstream packaging operations. Check out more of Kraken’s Automatic Cartoning Machines.