Pack-Smart's technology can be easily applied to card affixing, and we were blown away by their latest machine.

A gift card package isn't your standard card mount job and a secure gift card package is one of the most complex formats out there at the moment. There aren't many machines that can handle it. One of the things we love about this system is that it only uses one feeder to attach both the card and the leaflet.

Also, because the feeder is a pick and place feeder and not a friction feeder, the cards are stacked in the hopper in the same order as the carriers are stacked in the infeed. This means that you can run carriers 1 - 500 with cards 1 - 500. If you were using a friction feeder, you'd have to remember to run carriers and cards in reverse order (carriers 1 - 500 and cards 500 - 1).

A friction feeder does start things off at the infeed, sending a 4 panel carrier onto the vacuum belt. Hotmelt glue is applied, and a Rotary Placer picks a plastic card and a leaflet and places them in the realigner section. Here the magstripe of the card is read and the data is sent to the database. Next the card and leaflet are affixed to the carrier and a camera reads the carrier's barcode, to ensure it matches the affixed card. Three folds are made before the package is sealed. Any "bad" packages can be diverted before the finished products are shingled on the delivery belt. An alternative to the shingle delivery is an inline stacker, feeding into a flow wrapper.