Shrink wrap tubing can help to protect your products the same as a centerfold shrink wrap or shrink wrap bags. Shrink wrap
tubing does have several advantages in certain situations though. We will discuss that shortly. As you can see from the roll to the right, shrink wrap tubing comes on a roll and is measured in width x length. We will briefly go over some specific situations when using shrink wrap tubing would be advantageous, and also discuss how to measure for shrink wrap tubing.
Shrink wrap tubing can help make some shrink wrap operations more efficient. Shrink wrap tubing offers the advantage of only having to seal two sides when the product is placed inside of the tube. A recent customer offered a great example of shrink wrap tubing being more efficient than centerfold shrink wrap. They were wrapping ornate wooden spindles for retail sale. There were to be four spindles in a package. The customer had been using centerfold PVC shrink wrap to package their wooden spindles. The functionality of the centerfold shrink wrap was ideal and worked great. The problem was the centerfold shrink wrap was not efficient. The users had to put the spindles in the film and then seal three sides to start.
Shrink wrap tubing was an ideal product for their operation. Shrink wrap tubing enabled the user to slide the spindles into the tube, and seal two sides to start. After they got started only one seal was required each time they placed the spindles into the tubes.
Another specific example of when shrink wrap tubing can be advantageous to your operation, is when dealing with multiple sized products. We recently had a client that was shrink wrapping jars of multiple sizes. All of the jars were the same width, but there were more than five different heights of jars. Instead of using more than five different sizes of shrink wrap bags, the user was able to buy one roll of shrink wrap tubing to fit all jar lengths.
These are only a couple of examples how shrink wrap tubing can be beneficial over more commonly used centerfold shrink wrap and shrink wrap bags. Now let’s take a quick minute to go over how to measure for shrink wrap tubing. The easiest and best formula, is to measure the circumference of the object at it’s widest point. What ever that circumference is, add 10%, then divide by two. The number you get will be the width of shrink wrap tubing you will need. If that width is not available, don’t be afraid of going up to the next width. Shrink wrap tubing has up to a 40% shrink rate. It is always better to go with a larger size than a smaller size.
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