Almost 30 years ago, when our drying system was first designed, the pulp we were getting from the pulp mills was in sheets around 27×36″ and the drying system was made to these dimensions so the pulp sheets could be used as blotters.
Each pulp mill seems to have its own size of pulp sheet and the mill that produced the 27×36″ sheets no longer processes cotton linters. We haven’t been able to purchase this size of pulp sheets for several years now, and we are getting close to running out of the 2nd cut cotton linters of this size, even though we have been reserving them for use in drying systems only.
As of this writing we have about 30 cardboard sheets (plus about 20 with slight edge damage), and perhaps 120 sheets of linters in this size.
As a result, the time has come to change the size of our drying system to match the new pulp sheet size (and hope this doesn’t change again soon), which is about 30″ wide and 31″ long.
This is unfortunately too wide to fit existing drying boxes people may have made to use with the old size.
Other alternatives would be to go with 27×31″, which is the same width as the old system so there would be some degree of backwards compatibility, but this would mean we would have to cut 3″ off the width of all the pulp sheets we sell for drying systems. This would be time-consuming for us, and could potentially leave us with a glut of 2nd cut cotton linters pulp in the form of strips that won’t work for the drying system.
So our choice of new drying system size is a little up in the air, even more so after the thought I put into writing this post…
We’ve checked the measurements of the new pulp stock, and we will be going with 27×30″ for the new drying system size.
We’ll have pricing for the new system and components once we order new corrugated cardboard sheets.