Green Bay Packaging’s New VariFlex Winder Shipped from Voith Plant to its Permanent Home
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How do you get a 142,000-pound machine from its assembly plant to its permanent home 51 miles away? The answer is with careful planning, plenty of patience and just the right tools. It took those key factors to move a 40-foot-long paper winder unit from the Voith manufacturing plant in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Green Bay Packaging Inc.’s (GBP) new paper mill in Green Bay.
Check out the video of the transport process for the winder here.
“The goal of this transport operation was to safely move the new winder to Green Bay Packaging without having to disassemble it for transport. Along with our partner, R&J Trucking, we also wanted to make the delivery with as little disruption as possible to the communities along the way while protecting the machine itself,” explained David Buchanan, Voith Paper North America. “To make all that happen we opted to move the cargo over an indirect route, which allowed us to avoid adding to traffic congestion. It was a tremendous task, considering the size and weight of the winder.”
After the machine was loaded on to a special tractor-trailer with an extended bed, the journey followed a route that took it out of Appleton, into Black Creek, on to Hobart and through Bellevue, all in Wisconsin, before arriving a little more than two hours later to its final destination on North Quincy Street in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
How did the Voith winder get transported?
The Voith VariFlex Performance winder transported from Appleton is approximately 40 feet long, 8 feet tall and 8 feet high, and designed to accommodate paper production with sheets of paper as wide as 300 inches.
To accommodate such a large and heavy load, the winder needed a special wide-load transport vehicle. The winder was loaded and secured on a R&J’s 30-wheel, 7-axle tractor-trailer measuring 98 feet long, just over 10 feet wide, and weighing 120,000 lbs. During the journey, the maximum speed for the haul was 45 mph and, when navigating corners, it moved as slow as 5 mph.
“The transport of the winder to our new mill in Green Bay went incredibly smoothly, and we appreciate the work of Voith and R&J Trucking. The next step was the installation of the unit by Miron Construction, the construction company responsible for the plant assembly and crane operation during this move,” explained GBP’s Jonathon Gates. “We look forward to this mill’s completion, as it expands our capabilities in the paper market and strengthens our presence here in Wisconsin.”
The winder was then installed at the end of the mill’s new Voith XcelLine paper machine, which has a design speed of 3,940 ft/min. The new mill goes into full operation in 2021, and it will produce testliner paper for use in the containerboard industry.
Learn more about the landmark Green Bay Packaging project at: http://voith.com/corp-en/news-room/press-releases_109250.html
