Steve Pinette had a decision to make. The president of employee owned and operated Plastic Coated Papers in Pensacola, Florida, needed to replace a 1950s paper cutter for his extrusion coating and laminating company. He got more than he bargained for by purchasing a larger and reconditioned 110-inch Lawson with Microcut® electronics from Colter & Peterson, North America’s largest independent distributor of paper cutters and paper handling equipment.
Installed three months ago, the Lawson has dramatically improved productivity by handling jobs quicker and more accurately due to Microcut. With user-friendly programs, his cutter operators required less training and were up and running the machine soon after it was installed.
“We have worked with Colter & Peterson in the past. They have provided us technical support and parts for our previous machine, an 85-inch Seybold,” said Pinette, who has been with the 40- employee company for the past 16 years. “I was going back and forth between new and used machines before I called Bruce Peterson. He listened to what I had to say, and then said he had a better machine in mind for me. It had been used by Miller Zell (a retail experience solutions company in Atlanta) and he had just finished refurbishing it.”
A track record of success and more service years to come
After hearing Peterson’s pitch, Pinette liked what he heard about the rugged and long-lasting Lawson, which was first put into commission in the 1970s.
“It’s a very good machine, with automatic programming capability and better safety features. Size was not a big issue but we decided to go larger because it gives us more capability. Another enticement is that it is easier to maintain and to get replacement parts for this machine.”
Extrusion and laminating work at a grocery store near you
Pinette says 90 percent of his company’s work is with polycoated paper. They extrude polyethylene pellets on mill roll paper for moisture protection products such as freezer paper. The freezer paper is a poly wrap product used by butchers to package fresh meat. They service customers throughout North America, including Canada and Mexico.
“We oftentimes will sheet our material, for example, to a 36- by 36-inch sheet, then use the Lawson to cut it into a wide range of smaller sizes for our customers.” remarked Pinette. “Our job range is pretty wide, from 1,000 pounds of material up to a truckload of 44,000 pounds.”
Built to handle the toughest kind of work, the Lawson’s productivity boost from the Microcut retrofit system is providing a much appreciated bonus, Pinette says.
“Having Microcut is a huge benefit. Our guys had to manually line up jobs with a tape measurer type indicator on the Seybold. It makes the Lawson more accurate and that’s saving us a lot of time; every cut our guys made before, they had to reset for each job. Everything is done faster with the programming capability. Many of the jobs we do are run the same, so we just go to the menu option and recall a program. It’s easy to run and our operators really like it.”
