Quick Guide: Strapping Tool Maintenance

Rules for Tools: Strapping Tool Maintenance and Repair

Proper maintenance of all packaging equipment and tools is crucial to maximizing your uptime and keeping your costs low. With the right maintenance strategy and support from our experts at Midwest Packaging, you can drastically reduce unplanned downtime, keep your costs low, lengthen the service life of your tools, and ultimately maximize your profits. It’s a win-win-win-win for your business.

If you’re like us, battery-powered strapping tools are probably an important and integral part of your business. These hand tools are efficient and ergonomic solutions for all kinds of strapping applications. While wear and tear, breakdowns, and maintenance issues are inevitable, proper upkeep of your strapping tools is essential to maximizing your uptime and ensuring that they are functioning their best.

First Things First: Preventive Maintenance

This should be a no-brainer, but it’s always worth mentioning because its the single most important thing in maintaining the health of your tools: CLEAN YOUR STRAPPING TOOLS! Blowing the tool out daily (yes, daily) with compressed air is a great way to reduce strap debris. Also, be sure to remove any large pieces of strap debris as often and as quickly as possible! When you’re cleaning your strapping tools, it’s important to use either a nylon bristle or even a strip of strap to remove debris. Never use metal cleaning instruments on these tools as it can cause some serious damage!

Most strapping tools have a removable side panel that gives you direct access to the feed wheel. This allows you to remove any stuck debris from the teeth of the feed wheel, or the lower grabbers and the lower jaw, and helps to prevent the strap from slipping inside the tool. This also allows you to do a light inspection, re-lubricate if necessary, and keep the tool in tip-top shape, preventing any unnecessary repairs.

Be Gentle

Strapping tools are built extremely well and, in most cases, they’re pretty resilient to some minor drops and damage. However, it’s important to remember that there is complex machinery inside of these tools that must be protected and handled with care. Tools being dropped is one of the most common reasons for a tool being brought in for repair at Midwest Packaging. Upon inspection, we typically find wear items that need to be replaced, but its the drop that causes the most damage. Keeping these tools safe, secure, and on a sturdy surface will help to prevent any unnecessary repairs.

Additionally, it’s extremely important to never run the tool without any strap in it! This causes the feed wheel to wear against the lower grabbers. When this happens, both components become worn and may need to be replaced prematurely. 

But When the Inevitable Happens, Come See Us

Because of our intensive focus on strapping tools and our dedication to our customers, our expert repair technicians work with trusted manufacturers to get you the replacement parts you need (and none that you don’t), which means you won’t have to scrap the whole tool when just one part has gone bad.

When your tool comes into Midwest for service, we will first test it extensively to pinpoint the exact problem and generate a quote for the repair. Once approved, we’ll not only repair your tool, but we’ll also give it a good clean, re-lubricate everything, and reassemble it for another round of testing. You can trust that when your tool gets back to you, it will be back to working order—or often times, in better working order.

Does your vendor provide you with the peace of mind and security of tool repair and maintenance? If not, it might be time to consider Midwest Packaging. We’re here every step of the way— from providing packaging equipment tools, installation, service, and of course, repairs.