Bale without fail

In Ken Ely’s experience, it’s the small details that get overlooked when it comes to purchasing new or reconditioned ferrous balers.

A facility’s size, growth potential, finances and electrical capacity are some factors that shape decisions on what to do about such a vital piece of equipment.

Once a baler is up and running, preventive maintenance becomes a key consideration. Companies need to consider if they will handle the task in-house or outsource it.

As president of Lorain, Ohio-based Ely Enterprises Inc., which he founded in 1981, Ely has developed a full-service business that sells new and used baling equipment of various types. The company currently staffs 13 service technicians, and its 36,000-square-foot facility houses more than 100 machines and a fully stocked parts department.

Ely Enterprises is a distributor for baler brands such as Harris, Balemaster and Bace and has shipped balers to customers all over the world while helping with installations at a variety of businesses, including automobile manufacturers, scrap recyclers and retail companies.

Having worked with balers for more than 40 years, Ely and his staff have tried to assist customers with solutions to easily integrate the equipment into their plants.

“We say all the time that we want to be the value-added partner rather than just a business exchange,” he says. “We not only want to sell you the piece of equipment, but we want to help you design the facility, the location where you put the equipment and how to size the equipment. Then, we want to help you maintain it and service it down the road. Our service department is a multimillion-dollar segment of our business, so we do a lot of service work.”

The company’s experience helps customers make those decisions, Ely says. But, he adds, “If you’ve never [installed a baler] before, you don’t really know what you can and can’t do.”

Size it up

Ely says size is the biggest factor to consider when shopping for a baler.

“That’s in multiple areas,” he says. “If I’m a ferrous processor, what is the mill that I’m going to sell to or the foundry I’m going to sell to? What size bale or bundle do they want to receive, and how dense does that need to be? Once you have those answers, those will set you on the right path, and you’ll start looking at the different options.”

Ely says in some cases, a ferrous baler with a precompression lid might be necessary, while in other cases, a shear blade could be the better option.

“If I’m doing mandrel coils, I don’t really want to put them in a [Harris] TGS machine because trying to shear off mandrel coils underneath a shear blade is too much for the machine, even for the largest ones Harris builds,” Ely says.

“You have to know what size bundle you want to make, and you have to know what size the material is that you want to put into the baler because you don’t want to have to do a lot of preparation with a shear attachment or torches to size the material to put it into the baler.

“In an ideal world,” he adds, “you could just pick it up with a crane, put it on the loading table … that dumps it into the baler, and it processes the material and it makes a completed bale in 90 seconds or so.”

Recyclers also should consider baler placement. Should conveyors be positioned outside near the ground or up in the air? Is eddy current separation needed? Ely says both factors are important as well as a facility’s capacity for future growth.

He offers an auto manufacturing plant based in the Midwest as an example. The ferrous balers his company initially installed processed scrap from the plant’s nearby stamping operation. He says the auto manufacturer was consuming its own bales in addition to selling them to other companies and its furnace only would allow using an 8-foot-by-8-foot bale. As the company added more stamping capacity over time, the balers were unable to keep up.

“They kept bypassing the balers and shipping out scrap that was loose” to other consumers, Ely says. “And because they were shipping out scrap that was loose, they couldn’t maximize their return on that material.”

Ely Enterprises embarked on a three-year project with the manufacturer to design an on-site scrap processing facility. The equipment supplier removed and rebuilt the existing balers and reinstalled them with a system of 50-foot bunker conveyors so trucks could unload loose scrap to be fed to the balers at a consistent rate.

Details and maintenance

Attention to even small details can make a big difference when it comes to installing a ferrous baler.

“It’s the little things that people overlook,” Ely says. “They don’t look at the details on the electrical [or] the foundation.”

He recommends checking with an electrician to ensure the facility has enough power to properly run the machine.

When it’s time to install the baler, the space it occupies also should be considered.

Prior to a recent installation, Ely says a Mississippi-based customer removed its existing baler and laid a new foundation for the new baler.

Ely says that while the company could have installed the baler on the old baler’s foundation by including a 20-foot-by-20-foot 1-inch-thick steel plate to anchor the new baler to, the customer chose to “do it right” and shut down for two weeks to pour a new foundation.

“We explain all the different options to them, kind of a good, better, best. Those are the important things to take into consideration,” he says.

“It was a $650,000 investment for this baler,” Ely continues. “We had a nice, clean site. We set the new baler up, and it’s a great installation. It’s those little things. … That’s what we bring to the table. We really try to coach our customers through that.”

Once a baler is installed, routine maintenance can prolong its life and prevent downtime. Ely says changing the machine’s oil, or at least inspecting it, every six months to a year, can make a big difference. Similarly, it’s important to check the hydraulics and stay up to date on changing filters.

“The biggest thing you can do to prolong the life of your equipment is do an oil analysis on an annual basis, at minimum,” Ely says. “More appropriate would be every six months. When you do the analysis, it’ll tell you if there’s nickel in the oil, or if there’s ferrous material in the oil and what the oil’s viscosity is. It’ll tell you exactly where you are.”

While Ely Enterprises offers preventive maintenance plans, whether a facility performs maintenance on its own or hires outside help, he recommends paying attention to lead times for components.

A new cylinder, for example, could take between eight weeks and 16 weeks to receive.

“I think [lead times] are the whole key,” Ely says.

He adds that keeping replacements on hand for frequently used parts, such as electrical components, motors, pumps and cylinders, can be helpful.

When to buy, when to fix

Ely says deciding whether to buy a new or used baler or to refurbish an existing one should be based on individual needs, though finances are a major factor.

“Some customers don’t have the capital, so they’re looking for a lower-cost investment, and they may want to buy used,” he says. “The financial question for the customer is what’s their appetite, what do they have available for capital investment and what’s their taxable situation. A lot of times we’ll bring their accountant into that equation and ask what they think makes the most sense.”

A distributor such as Ely Enterprises will go over pricing options on new and used machinery to help a customer identify the type of baler that makes sense for its operation and budget while also offering warranties on the purchase.

Each reconditioned machine that Ely Enterprises sells comes with a warranty that lasts anywhere from six months to a year, while a new machine will be warrantied for as many as two years for components to five years on the structure, depending on the manufacturer, or based on 2,000 hours of operation.

“It’s just like a car,” Ely says. “If you have a 15-year-old car and it just needs tires, then it makes sense [to repair it]. But if it needs tires, brakes, transmission work and it’s got a bad clutch, maybe it’s time to invest in something newer.”

For reconditioned machines, in particular, Ely recommends customers do thorough research and get a clear understanding of what has been reconditioned on the unit and who performed the work to ensure expectations are met.

“If you’re going to buy a reconditioned machine and make a substantial investment in that, at the very least, do a virtual call where they can walk around the machine, and you can really drill down and see what’s going on with that machine,” he says. “Or, invest in a plane ticket and come and look at it for a day. … Make sure you know what you’re buying. Get out and take a look at it.”

The author is associate editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at cvoloschuk@gie.net.