For over 25 years, Stephen Weston has built a materials handling business designing and supplying unique Lifting Attachments to fit onto Forklifts and more often, pedestrian controlled Stacker Trucks, in order to enable customers to handle difficult loads, in difficult locations.
His company, Weston Handling Ltd, (WH), is a small outfit, located in the North of England, yet it has a global customer base made up of many international Blue-Chip customers, that have chosen WH to design and build their lifting attachments in preference to a plethora of major Forklift Truck attachment manufacturers. Over 70% of WH’s custom attachments are exported, mainly to the USA and Europe.
The company has focused on a niche market, (albeit a), of the global Flexible Packaging industries, such as the manufacture and processing of Paper and Plastic film, for Printing, Laminating, and manufacturing of products, such as Bags to Banknotes and from Boxes to Food Packaging. Most of which are processed in reels and rolls of varying sizes, wound on cardboard cores.
WH’s success lies in not just designing lifting attachments, but developing a materials handling ‘solution’ that takes into account where the product is coming from, where it is going to, and how it will work in the production environment with the machinery and personnel around it. Often, WH’s attachments are multi-functional.
Examples of this can be found in WH’s Slitter Unload Systems, which tackle the laborious task of unloading many small rolls from a horizontal winder shaft, to stack them vertically on a pallet. As manual handling regulations become tighter and operator welfare is given greater priority, Weston developed several unique attachments to relieve the stress and improve productivity.
Weston™ 'V' Cradle test assembly
Stephen Weston explains: “Almost everyone is familiar with labels on bottles and cans and with products from sweets to dishwasher tablets in branded plastic pouches. But few people know that the individual per packet/label branding is first printed multiple times across large reels, typically up to 1600mm wide x 1000mm diameter. Then the printed substrate is slit into individual width rolls on a Slitting machine and wound up into smaller rolls on multiple shafts, to prevent interleaving. Look at any supermarket shelf, anywhere in the world and that is the US$260Billion market. Flexible packaging and within that, for Slitter Unload trucks.”
An example of a Slitter Unload attachment currently in build for a UK Packaging company is the Weston™ ‘V’ Cradle. Seen here in test assembly showing a backplate for mounting onto the Class II carriage of a Stacker Truck.
The Stacker will have its hydraulics modified to power the lifting of the cradle from vertical to horizontal, where it can unload a full stack of slit rolls in one go.
On this model, there is a second attachment of a small Swing Jib Crane, which fits onto the top of the truck’s mast, that supports a 24V Hoist on a rolling trolley, and a Vertical Roll Lifter (VRL), that grips rolls in their core. Thus with this one truck fitted with these two attachments, manual handling of heavy slit rolls is virtually eliminated, as shown in these photos.
Usually WH’s manufacturing attachments are designed to fit onto popular Stacker Trucks or smaller Forklift trucks, fitted with Class II carriages, as shown in the first photograph. WH’s attachments are designed to be light, easily mounted and powered from the truck's own, modified hydraulics. This combination of attachments can be easily retrofitted to almost any make or model of Forklift Truck or Stacker Truck.
Sometimes the customer is an end user, such as a Food manufacturing company like General Mills, but more often the customer is a specialist manufacturer, printer or processor of flexible packaging, where multiple machines are working in a cramped, busy environment. It is here that Weston Handling’s designs focus on the operator and how an attachment can enable operators to carry out multiple tasks, easily and safely.
Weston’s approach for the customer buying the current Slitter Unload attachment in build, was to first carry out a site survey, not only of the customer’s premises, but also of the operators’ preferences for handling rolls from machine to pallet. Then a group of operators were taken to try out a similar attachment at a previous customer’s premises, where one operator went from man-handling every roll in the factory, to having manual handling eliminated.
Weston Handling’s range of Reel, Roll and Shaft Handling attachments have been designed to be easily fitted to virtually any make of Forklift or Stacker Truck, and even includes fork mounted Roll Turner attachments, with their own built-in battery powered hydraulic Rotators, that can be picked up by a standard Forklift truck, used to turn reels, then put down out of the way, without having to swap over the forks.
WHC Fork-Mounted Roll Turner