HAMMOND, Ind. — Jeff
Bridgegroom had a problem. The vice president and general manager of Calumet Pallet Co.
Inc., he found that some pallets made of recycled parts and assembled on the
company’s new Viking nailing machine exhibited the "rocking chair" effect.
Some of the finished pallets would teeter back and forth slightly because of the variation
in some of the recycled stringers.
The solution was the stringer sizer machine developed by Pallet Repair
Systems (PRS). The PRS stringer sizer has saved Calumet a substantial amount of money by
eliminating the need for new stringers, Jeff said. "And we can still make a top
quality pallet with the Viking Champion machine," he added. "Those two pieces of
equipment (the PRS stringer sizer and the Viking Champion) have really helped us to grow
to where we are now."
Calumet Pallet got its start when Jeff’s father, Al, was a butcher
for the A&P grocery chain. "Dad was always a hustler, finding ways to make extra
money," Jeff recalled. Al offered to take away pallets used to ship incoming
deliveries, but the truck drivers told him they were worth money. He started collecting
unwanted pallets, hauling them around in a pick-up truck and selling them on his day off.
By the time he was laid off by A&P around 1975, he had enough business that he could
work at it full-time. Jeff joined him as a teenager when the company was incorporated in
1982.
The company took its name from Calumet City, Illinois, where Al first
leased a warehouse for the business. In 1983, after growing to seven employees, Al
relocated the company to Hammond, Ind., where he bought a small warehouse on 1 acre. In
1994 the company bought 7.5 acres and its current facility, where it now has 30,000 square
feet under roof.
Calumet Pallet, located about 5 miles from the outskirts of Chicago,
now has about 86 employees who work in two shifts. The company manufactures and sells
around 23,000 pallets per week, mainly recycled and remanufactured pallets. (About 15% of
its volume is new pallets.) About 60 percent of its volume is custom pallets and the
remaining 40 percent is a typical 48×40 footprint. It services some 500 customer accounts
— Calumet is heavily involved in the food industry — mainly in a 200-mile
radius, doing business in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. Calumet’s
customers include a few national accounts that ship recycled pallet cores from as far away
as California and New York.
In its recycling operations Calumet uses Smart bandsaw dismantlers for
disassembly. A pair of PRS Optimax reclaim saws are used for trimming ends of recovered
lumber. Notching stringers is done on a Yoder machine with Profile Technology indexable
heads. Calumet also has a pair of Heartland chop saws and a Baker Products chop saw as
well as a Delta radial arm saw. The company’s repair operations are automated with a
system from Industrial Resources that is fed by two PRS tippers. For manufacturing new
pallet parts it has a Brewco four-head horizontal bandsaw system. Besides the Viking
Champion, some custom pallets are assembled with Max nailing tools. Calumet has about 100
semi-trailers at various customer locations to collect and retrieve used pallets.
Al, 55, and Jeff, 36, plan to expand the company further. They are
considering adding another nailing machine and also opening new locations outside their
region. "We stress giving our customers a top quality pallet at a good price and good
service," said Jeff. Father and son are joined in the business by Al’s wife,
Carol, who handles Calumet’s bookkeeping.
When the problem with the "rocking chair" stringers
developed, the company quickly turned to PRS. "We’ve known Jeff Williams for a
long time," said Jeff.
"I have a lot of respect for the PRS team as a whole because of
their knowledge and capabilities," Jeff added, and because the company has provided
effective, efficient solutions for Calumet’s pallet recycling operations.
The PRS stringer sizer, equipped with a Profile Technology NAILBUSTER ® cutting
head, surfaces stringer height down from the top to create stringers of uniform thickness.
"No matter what they were when they went in, they will come out a uniform size,"
said Jeff. The machine can size a stringer in about 10 seconds. A worker can place up to
about a dozen used stringers into the infeed hopper. The used stringers automatically feed
from the bottom of the stack. After they are sized, a kick-over can send them into a bin.
At Calumet, after the operator loads the hopper, he off-loads the finished stringers
instead of using the kick-over, stacking the finished stringers neatly so they can be
easily handled later by the Viking operator.
Calumet has been running the PRS stringer sizer for about two years. The cutting
head’s NAILBUSTER ® indexable inserts are rotated weekly; the inserts can be
re-ground and re-used for about three months. "I am very pleased with the way the
inserts and the machine have held up," said Jeff. "We have very low maintenance
on both the machine and the heads."
