When Adhesives Stick Too Well

If you work with calendar rolls, adhesive pumps, mixing kettles, mixer blades, rolls, rails, conveyors, frames, wheels, gears, dispensers, sealers, extruders, testers, applicators or a whole host of other components utilized in the manufacture and handling of adhesives - chances are very good that you know all too well the one universal truth of the adhesive formulator, manufacturer and applicator. That truth is this:

When adhesives come in contact with unprotected equipment surfaces, they do precisely what they're designed to do - they stick. And in the process they will gum up the best laid plans of production engineers.

Sonoco Products Company, an Indiana-based manufacturer of specialty packaging, faced costly snags in the seemingly straight-forward manufacture of its fiber packaging forms. The process starts with the coating of a continuous web of fiber with a wet adhesive. The web then goes through stainless steel metering rolls where it is chopped into sheets of prescribed lengths. The cut sheets are fed into a winding machine and precision rolled to create a ruggedly sturdy tube which is affixed to the inside corners of a carton. In the winding stage, however, transfer of the wet adhesive onto the stainless steel rolls created a host of stubborn clean-up difficulties. These, in turn, resulted in excessive and expensive downtime.