Stackers/Palletizers — Safety Comes First

"There have been so many improvements in the safety-related engineering of the equipment, that people aren't always thinking when they turn the electrical power off on a 20-year-old machine. They can't assume that all sources of energy have been removed."

Pagel notes that he is seeing more requests for pallet-to-pallet operation. "People want to feed directly from a pallet rather than having to load the machine and, consequently, they want to deliver a stack directly to the pallet rather than going into some type of vise that requires operator intervention to remove the pallet or remove the stock and place it into another operation. There are more applications where they want to go pallet-to-pallet."