Baling Excellence

Excel Manufacturing Inc. may be a relative newcomer to baler and conveyor manufacturing, but it has quickly established an excellent name for itself in the business.

By Kristina Rundquist

Kristina Rundquist is an associate editor of Scrap.

What a difference a few years can make.

Perhaps no one knows that better than the folks at Excel Manufacturing Inc. The company opened its doors nearly seven years ago, manufacturing balers and conveyor systems in a tiny workshop in Marion, Minn. Since then, Excel has grown in leaps and bounds with 45 full-time employees and five regional sales managers whose territories span the globe.

Not bad for a company that was founded on a single, humble concept: to produce a small, compact baler that would bale secondary fiber without fluffing.

The Excel Approach 

As Ron Fritcher, general manager, tells it, it was in 1991 that Excel owner and CEO Bryan Fisher and two partners (both of whom have since left the company) decided to branch out on their own. Fisher recognized the need in the industry for a compact piece of baling equipment. “He saw that with the state and federal mandates calling for increased recycling efforts, there was a necessity in the market for a small, horizontal baler,” says Fritcher. 

In 1994, Fritcher hired Floyd Tuominen, formerly president of Harris Waste Management Group Inc. and Marathon Overseas, to assist Excel in various management and sales projects.

These days, Excel sits on 5 acres in St. Charles, Minn., located about 20 minutes east of Rochester. The company’s 20,000-square-foot operation is divided into three sections—office space, a production area, and an area for product finishing.

Fritcher is quick—and proud—to note that the firm does all of its own manufacturing in-house. “Anything that has to do with the actual structure of the baler or conveyor, we do here,” he says. “We do all of our own deburring and milling—whatever steel plates or tubes we purchase, we cut to match the specific size or pattern we’re making.”

While the company does its own assembly and finishing, all the parts that Excel uses are off-the-shelf, Fritcher says. The exceptions are cylinders for the simple fact that there are very few that are truly off-the-shelf, he notes. “We use specific manufacturers for all of our part types, so if a customer needs a part for their machine, all they have to do is go to any supply store that carries that brand and interchange it,” he explains. “It’s not something they have to go back to the manufacturer for.” Some baler manufacturers, in contrast, contract with vendors to make specific parts that are not common, which forces the customer to return to the baler manufacturer when those parts break down, he says.

Excel’s “more open policy” of using readily available parts gives it an edge, Fritcher maintains, asserting, “I think it’s one of the reasons we’re successful. For one thing, it’s just easier for our customers.”

The company’s use of common, easily found parts, however, doesn’t mean it won’t custom-make an order. “If a customer needs a custom hopper extension or the height dropped down to fit in their building, we will definitely work to accommodate them,” says Fritcher.

As for larger, more specialized requests, Excel will consider those too. “If we have a customer that says, ‘I want you to create a totally new and different baler for us,’ that would be a very large R&D engineering undertaking. But certainly we would look into it,” he says, noting, “we determine those projects on a case-by-case basis.” For the most part, however, most of the alteration requests Excel receives relate to a facility’s size or the way in which a conveyor aligns with a baler, he says.

It’s for this very reason that Excel prefers to sell its balers and conveyors as a package. “The baling and conveyor systems we manufacture are complete systems,” Fritcher asserts. “Everything stays in line—the hopper extensions fit exactly with the conveyor and so forth. When you try to mix and match pieces of equipment from different manufacturers, you’ll generally find you’re an inch off here and three inches there. So you’ll need to have someone on-site make the installation adjustments to make something fit or you’ll have to live with the gap.”

Models of Excellence 

When Excel started, it had only one product—the EX60 horizontal baler. To complement it, the company also manufactured a slider-bed conveyor with a rubber-composite belt that was expressly designed for use in the postconsumer recyclables market.

That was then.

In 1994, Excel began to expand its offerings to the point where it currently produces five horizontal balers and two conveyor systems. “Our product line ranges from a very simplistic horizontal baler for postconsumer recyclables to a large two-ram baler for use in recycling centers that process several thousand tons a month,” says Fritcher.

The single-ram EX60 horizontal baler—still one of Excel’s mainstays—and its sister EX60-II model are ideally suited for smaller recycling operations that process postconsumer recyclables exclusively. The EX60 is particularly adept at baling office paper, OCC, ONP, and OMG without shredding or fluffing the material. Says Fritcher, “They’re designed for curbside recycling products. They can handle tin cans, aluminum cans, and plastics in addition to the various fibers.”

As for the EX60-II, improvements have been made regarding the gathering platen’s operation and several safety features have been added. With the EX60, the operator has to physically move a lever to eject a bale, Fritcher notes. With the EX60-II, in contrast, the gathering platen extends to the full length of the chamber so that the bale is pushed out the door, which means there’s no manual intervention. The EX60-II also offers greater platen pressure and, hence, produces denser, heavier bales.

The next step up is the EX60HV, a more rugged version of its siblings. With its single-sheet construction for added strength, Fisher designed this model to process all the materials the EX60 and EX60-II can handle—that is, postconsumer recyclables—as well as several varieties of nonferrous scrap, including but not limited to copper, aluminum extrusions, and white goods. According to Fritcher, this compact machine “makes nice, heavy, mill-sized bales” and is perfectly suited to scrap processing operations.

Given that all of the EX-series balers are hand-tie systems, the processing capacity of each machine will vary from site to site depending on the operator and the material being processed. “Some materials will bond themselves together so you won’t need to tie them off,” Fritcher notes. “But if you have an employee on the floor tying them off, the machine’s output will depend on his efficiency, how many operators you have working the system, how it’s being loaded, and what kind of equipment you have readily available when the bale is ejected.”

That said, Fritcher offers that if an operation is doing anything less than 3 tons an hour, it should stick with the single-ram EX series. Processors with higher throughput might want to consider moving up to the company’s line of two-ram balers.

The Two-Ram Advantage 

Currently, Excel’s two-ram offerings are the 2R9 and 2R10 models. The two balers are identical in function, the difference being that they have a 9-inch and 10-inch cylinder, respectively. Both are well-suited to the scrap industry’s needs, perhaps more so because they come with an optional separation door that allows recyclers to process different materials without blending bales.

In either event, the two-ram balers are all auto-tie systems and connect directly with Excel’s flat-section conveyor belt. Another feature Fisher incorporated into Excel’s two-ram machine was operator-free automation. Both models come equipped with a computerized control panel that tracks the ram position, bale size, and baling rate. With this information, the program automatically adjusts to produce consistently sized bales. “The operator doesn’t need to be, nor should he be, around the system,” asserts Fritcher. “The beauty is that the operator need only be feeding the flat-section pit, pushing material onto the belt while the baler is doing the work on its own.”

As for the company’s conveyor systems, scrap processors can choose from a variety of options and styles: Slider-bed conveyors can be either in-ground or above-ground systems, while flat-section—or D-style—conveyors are available only as in-ground systems. The conveyor systems come standard with a self-cleaning mechanism—which goes a long way toward preventing belt wear-and-tear—as well as an energy-efficient motor with remote, variable settings and vulcanized, not bolted, cleats. With both models, customers can choose from either a rubber-composite or steel roller-chain belt.

Scrap processors, Fritcher suggests, lean toward steel roller-chain belts because “from a structural standpoint they’re able to handle the nonferrous materials.”

Of note, Excel has incorporated a popular safety feature in its combined baler and conveyor systems. Specifically, it has linked the baler and conveyor systems so they are treated as one unit when an emergency switch is thrown. “If you stop a portion of the equipment, be it the baler or conveyor, you stop the entire piece of equipment, so operators never get confused as to whether a part is on or off,” Fritcher notes.

Out-Baling the Rest 

While Excel’s products have met with tremendous success in its short history, there’s no clear-cut favorite among its customers. Spurred on by its rapid rise in the competitive baler-manufacturing industry, Excel plans to do more than tread water. Says Fritcher, “We’re going to continue to grow the business as our customer base dictates to provide excellence in the industry—because that’s really what we do.”

The company’s R&D department is already hard at work, he notes, mapping out projects for the next 18 months. “We’re actively working on the release of several different products,” he says, “but we’re also always looking at product improvement. With technology changing so fast, we’re constantly looking at things that will improve the quality of our machines.”

Perhaps the company’s biggest challenge, Fritcher says, is “properly educating prospective customers on the specific excellence of our machines as opposed to the competitive lines. If we have an informed customer who understands the difference between Excel and the competition, we’re confident that they’ll buy our product.” •