Comprehensive Guide to Alcohol Packaging Boxes

Paper molded packaging boxes are formed by bonding surface materials with molded substrates to create various components, which are then assembled into multi-component boxes. Currently, the materials used for paper molded packaging boxes are becoming increasingly diversified and complex. Surface materials are mostly paper, plastic, fabric, leather, etc., while the molded substrates are mostly cardboard, medium-density fiberboard, plastic, tinplate, and other materials.

Because these types of packaging boxes use a wide range of materials, have long production processes, many parts, and complex structures, they are mainly manually produced. However, with a significant increase in market demand, improvements in industrial manufacturing and automation levels, and intensifying market competition, the structure of these boxes has become largely standardized. For mainstream box types such as top-opening bucket boxes, two-piece boxes, book-style boxes, and drawer boxes, full-line automated production has now been realized.

As shown in Figure 1, a top-opening bucket box refers to a vertically oriented square box that opens from the top, with a continuous hinged lid attached to the vertical box body. As shown in Figure 2, a two-piece box refers to packaging boxes formed by combining an upper and lower single box that are not connected to each other, closed in a sleeve cover format, with the upper box called the 'top' and the lower box called the 'bottom.' As shown in Figure 3, a book-style box refers to a packaging box that opens like a book from right to left, generally consisting of a cover and an inner box. The cover wraps the inner box, with a part of the cover being movable to serve as the lid.

Figure 1 Opening the barrel-type box

Figure 2 Heaven and Earth Box

Figure 3 Book box

For the above three common box types, there are many equipment manufacturers in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province and Dongguan, Guangdong Province in the production and research and development of related automation equipment, and some only produce assembly line side auxiliary equipment, such as foam pressing machines, folding edge forming machines, etc.; some produce corresponding automation equipment for a certain component, such as shell machine, cover plate assembly machine, barrel box body forming machine, heaven and earth box forming machine, etc.; A small number of enterprises have developed a whole line of automation equipment for a single box type, that is, the automatic molding of each component, the automatic connection of each molding workstation, and the automatic assembly of each component, including the box body, box cover, anti-vibration pad, bagging, etc., but does not have the manufacturing capacity of multiple box type automatic production lines.

In general, the development of the automated production line of this type of packaging box is still lacking, compared with traditional printing and packaging machinery such as printing machines, hot stamping machines, die-cutting machines, etc., there is still a significant gap in speed, precision, stability, and quality of the whole machine, and there is still a long way to go in the future. Based on the investigation of the display of wine products on the shelves of supermarkets on the market, the structure of the existing mainstream wine molding packaging box is analyzed, and a number of wine molding packaging box manufacturers and knife template manufacturers are communicated, and the automation equipment manufacturers of this type of product are visited and investigated.

Overall appearance

01

Turn on the direction

The common top-opening barrel box and book-shaped box open the lid from right to left, and the opening hole is generally located on the right side; However, in the past two years, the trend of opening the lid from front to back is more obvious.

The heaven and earth box is divided into two mainstream methods: top opening and bottom opening, and the internal products remain in the ground box after opening. If the size ratio of the box type is vertical, the large single box can be designed according to the forming method of the barrel box.

02

Seam location

The display surface is the front, and the middle seam position is generally located on the side, back, left side, right side, and the mouth must not be on the main display surface after molding.

Die-cutting direction

Usually the front of paper tissue paper is die-cut, and the back of plastic paper and leather color is die-cut. In addition, very few products with high requirements for contour regularity have indentations on the color surface with V-grooves on the back.

Face paper structure of automatic forming machine

The most common molding machine production line in the industry is based on the direction of paper feeding, the bottom of the tissue paper is on the right, the lap edge of the middle seam is in the front direction, and the forward feed is the standard model. The forming of the main machine is on the left side of the paper direction. Of course, there are also a few packaging box mouth shapes and differentiated layouts, which require the forming machine to feed paper in reverse, that is, the edge of the middle seam is on the last side.

Whether the bottom paper is connected to the box body, and whether there is a large area of the mouth edge, it can be formed. When forming, the back of the tissue paper is glued, and the plate is aligned along the direction of the middle seam and the edge of the mouth, and the back of the tissue paper is bonded to the back of the plate, and the schematic diagram of alignment molding is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 Alignment Molding Diagram

Surface Material Fit Dimensions

01
Hole Diameter Fit

After centering the surface material hole with the board hole, the outer diameter of the surface material hole is 4mm, the inner diameter is 5mm, and the cardboard hole is the same as the inner diameter of the surface material hole. When opening the barrel-type box lid from the top, the inner and outer hole sizes of the surface material are consistent with the industrial cardboard size of 6mm.

02
Double Crease Lines

The width of the double crease lines should be designed to increase by 0.3mm according to the thickness of the board.

03
Design of Overlap Edge

The overlap edges are divided into three types: mouth overlap, middle seam overlap, and bottom overlap, with edge widths of 15–20mm. The die-cut lines of the mouth and bottom overlap edges are 0.5mm away from the closest point of the mouth and bottom crease lines.

The slope of the mouth overlap edge is 90°, while the die-cut lines and crease lines of the book-type box mouth overlap intersect, and the slope of the overlap edge is 45°. The slope of the middle seam overlap edge is 10–15°. The slope of the bottom overlap edge is 90°.

04
Surface Material Side Dimensions

The middle seam side dimension equals the other side dimension minus 0.5–1mm.

Industrial Cardboard

01
Cardboard Shrinkage in Relation to Surface Paper

Surface papers that easily absorb water and expand significantly refer to materials whose backside has no water-sealing layer, generally 105–125g lightweight paper. Cardboard width = corresponding surface paper width - 0.3mm, cardboard height = corresponding surface paper width - 1mm.

Surface paper with moderate expansion after water absorption refers to materials with water-sealing on the backside, generally 150–190g specialty paper or white card paper for surface sheets. Cardboard width = corresponding surface paper width - 0.5mm, cardboard height = corresponding surface paper width - 1mm.

Surface papers with minimal expansion after water absorption refer to materials with water-sealing on the backside, generally 255–375g gold/silver card paper or high-weight specialty paper. Cardboard width = corresponding surface paper width - 0.7mm, cardboard height = corresponding surface paper width - 1mm.

However, the side width of the middle seam of industrial cardboard does not consider shrinkage and should match the width of the other side. After identifying the root cause, we made technical requirements for replacing the embossing rollers. First, before replacing the rollers, measure the diameter error at both ends; if the error exceeds 0.5mm, the roller cannot be used and must be re-ground, with proper identification of larger/smaller ends. Second, avoid having the larger/smaller ends of adjacent machine rollers facing the same side. These measures basically eliminate misalignment caused by diameter differences at roller ends.

02
Cardboard Fit Method

There are generally two types of fit for the middle seams of box body cardboard: concave-convex interlock and 45° beveled edge collision. The fit between the bottom of the box body cardboard and the bottom board generally has two methods: concave-convex interlock and right-angle edge collision.

Long-term verification has shown that whether using automatic forming machines or traditional manual operations, concave-convex interlocks are more structurally stable and less prone to uneven heights. Concave-convex depth = cardboard thickness - 0.1mm, with a 1mm width difference between concave and convex parts. The bottom groove lock of the box body is trapezoidally designed with a width of 20–35mm. Middle seam concave-convex locks are designed to divide five parts within 20mm from both ends.

03
Perforation Lines

Box lids for bonding blister pads or ribbons can be designed with perforations for positioning. Areas of the cardboard that need to be torn should be designed with perforation lines to reduce ragged edges when torn.

04
Perforation Lines

The width of the mouth strip is 18–25mm, usually 20mm. The back of the barrel-type box mouth strip is half-cut, leaving 1/3 uncut according to the cardboard thickness.

05
Slotting Requirements

The die-cut files should clearly specify slotting angles. The slotting angles for various products under the current process are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Slotting angle of industrial cardboard

Imposition matters

The conventional paper sizes in the industry are 787×1092mm for positivity, 889×1194mm for generosity, and 787mm and 889mm for roll width. Usually the first size of the paper is the paper horizontal, and the second size is the vertical direction of the paper, that is, the fiber direction.

When imposing, try to consider the horizontal size of paper according to the standard size of 787mm and 889mm to save paper, and it is not easy for paper manufacturers to change this size, unless the single order volume reaches several hundred tons. The longitudinal size customization of paper is highly feasible.

01

Box imposition

When the box body is multi-assembled, head-to-head and head-to-tail are combined with imposition, the middle 1 is symmetrical in the center, and the slotted position of the 3 pieces is as aligned as possible.

02

Box lid imposition

The box cover industrial cardboard tail is connected to the tail in two rows, with an intermediate tooth knife or dot, and then multi-piece.

03

Liner imposition

When the proportion of low gram heavy lining paper is large in length and width, Pinduo needs to make the long side of the single piece vertical and the long side parallel to the horizontal of the paper. Normally, the first size of a sheet of paper size is the paper grain horizontal.

04

Connect the dots

The dot connection between the patch and the dot width is 0.8mm, which is convenient for die-cutting production, and the dot is on the V groove line or both sides of the concave and convex position, not in the groove, mouth or easily visible parts.

Through the investigation, analysis and production practice in the past two years, the company has opened a number of production lines such as barrel boxes, heaven and earth boxes, automatic forming lines for book boxes, and traditional manual assembly lines.

As long as the order of matching sizes is clarified, the inner size of the outer parts is matched with the outer size of the inner component, and the thickness of the material is considered, the thickness of the unpressed, and the thickness of the grooved is considered, the new project can reduce the twists and turns of production and quickly enter the state of mass production.