MINI PAK'R Air Cushion Machine

Great price

It's not good! The machine broke several times in the 1st month of use. The service even worse. It took them one week to send replacement.

Love the machine however the blade only lasts about 18 hours of run time. Be sure that you purchase additional blades to have on hand as we have had a "down machine" twice due to the blade issue.

Wonderful invention, reliable ... just the ticket for a tiny business. Every day, I mail between 2 and 10 packages of glassware. Each box is about 10x10x10 inches and, naturally, I worry about each package. For ten years, I used packing peanuts. I'd run through a bag of peanuts every week, so I'd buy 4 to 6 bags at a time. Oh, how these took up space (and what a mess around the house - squashed peanuts underfoot) After realizing that my home business wasn't going away (it's now my 15th year!), I invested in a mini pak'r air-pillow machine. Happy? You bet! No more packing peanuts! Since my glassware is delicate, I make sure there are pillows on all sides (no glassware touching the wall of the cardboard box). The 4x8 inch pillows work perfectly for my operation; the weight of the pillows is slightly less than the equivalent mass of peanuts. (The cost per cubic foot of air-pillows works out to be almost twice the cost of the cheapest packing peanuts, but this is trivial since postage swamps the packing cost) Packing my glassware goes faster with the air-pillows, since it's easy to tear off the right number of pillows and wrap 'em around the bottle. I make sure that there is always at least one inch between the glass and the inside edge of the box. However, I do not stuff the box completely with air-pillows, to give room to expand when the air pressure changes (see below). The mini packer machine lets you adjust the amount of air in each pillow; I've never played with this. You can also set the length of the string of airpillows that come out each time you press the green button; I've set this to 7 feet. You can also change the sealing heat, but I've never bothered. The 4x8 inch film inflates to form pillows that are about 2.5 inches thick and around 6 inches long. Five of them fit into a 6x4x4 inch box. Oh - this is important: Since the air-pillows are sealed air balloons, they will expand when taken up in an airplane. Since many of my shipments go by air, I deliberately do not completely fill the box with air pillows. Instead, I leave a bit of room for the air pillows to expand. Not enough to rattle, but a smidgen less than completely full. After a year of using the mini pak'r, I've had exactly zero broken shipments (which is the same as when I used packing peanuts). So these things work well. I mounted the machine on the wall, using a few screws (there's a wall-mounting device available, but I didn't want to spend $100, so I just bolted a piece of plywood to the machine, and then screwed the plywood to my wall). When wall-mounted, the machine is especially nice, since it swallows no table space, and the air pillows wind up right where I want 'em. The machine eats about 4 watts in standby, 30 to 50 watts when ready for action, and around 200 watts while heating up. There are several sources for the air-pillow film; use your favorite search engine to find a supplier (I purchase about 10 or 12 rolls at a time from Uline). Be careful, however - make sure the film is compatible with the mini-packer. A few downsides: The green and red buttons are a bit cheezy - after a year, the green button is showing cracks. Also, I cannot find any biodegradable air pillow film (the green tinted kind), but I understand that this may be due to my living in California. I (and my customers) care about minimizing plastics in landfills. Conclusion: this is an ideal machine for the small business. When wall mounted, it takes minimal room, and saves so much room compared with packing peanuts.

I like the machine, but there is an important consumptive part for the machine, the blade. Please let me know how I can buy the blade in the future.