Drum Pourers & Rackers

Drum Pourers & Rackers Buying Guide

Pouring and racking are the two jobs on this page. Every machine here does one of two things, and it helps to name them before shopping. Pouring is controlled dispensing: the machine raises a drum and tilts it so liquid or dry product comes out of a faucet, valve, or cone at a rate you control, then returns the drum upright without a spill. Racking is storage plus dispensing: the machine lifts an upright drum and rotates it to horizontal so it lies on a rack, where a faucet left in the bung makes the rack a standing dispensing station. Neither job is lifting a drum through the air, which is drum lifting attachments, and neither is rolling one across the floor, which is drum dollies and carts. If the drum needs to be tipped, metered, or laid down, you are on the right page.

Pourers raise the drum, then tilt it a controlled 360 degrees. A Morse vertical-lift pourer runs the drum up a vertical track and then rotates it, and the rotation is the point: you can tilt a full drum 360 degrees in either direction and stop at any angle, so the pour starts slow and never gets away from you. Most models use a 12 volt DC battery-powered hydraulic lift and tilt, with air and plug-in electric options, all rated at 800 lb. The reach that separates them is pouring height. Single-stage machines dispense up to about 60 inches, enough to pour into a tank or mixer at working height, and two-stage models reach up to about 106 inches for elevated hoppers and totes. The 26 inch Mobile Karrier Pourer is the low, wheeled version: a hand-pump lift you roll to the point of use and pour at bench height, from around $3,840.

Rackers lay the drum on its side and become a dispensing station. Racking a drum means lifting it upright, tilting it to horizontal, and setting it on a rack so it lies on its side. Do that with the faucet or valve already in the bung and the rack turns into a gravity dispensing station you draw from all week. The Morse drum racker for horizontal 55 gallon drums is the floor-standing version of this, from about $5,600 at 800 lb, and it handles a drum with a faucet up to roughly 10 inches long left in place. Racked drums sit side by side with almost no clearance between them, so a wall of them takes less floor than the same drums standing upright, and every one is ready to dispense without being touched again.

MORStak turns a forklift into a drum racker. The MORStak rackers are forklift attachments, and they exist to kill the most dangerous habit in a drum room: balancing a drum on bare forks. The fork-mount and carriage-mount MORStak models, around $8,810 and $8,910, carry a self-contained 12 volt battery that powers the drum tilt, run from a two-button pendant that reaches back to the operator, and lift a rimmed upright 55 gallon steel or plastic drum, tilt it to horizontal, and place it in a rack up to about 8.5 feet high, then retrieve it and stand it back up. The Omni-Lift Karrier Drum Racker, from about $4,080, is the self-mobile floor version for shops without a forklift, racking a drum up to roughly 6 feet and handling either an upright or an already-horizontal drum.

The palletizer moves rimmed drums on and off pallets. The Morse rimmed drum palletizer, from about $13,820 at 1,000 lb, does the job its name says: it raises a rimmed upright drum and sets it onto or lifts it off a pallet, spill-containment pallet, or dolly, with a V-shaped base that reaches into a pallet corner so drums pack tight. It earns its place next to the pourers and rackers because a full drum's journey often ends the same way, up off the floor and onto something. Some machines here collapse several of those steps into one chassis: the Hydra-Lift Karrier lifts, wheels, and pours from a single unit from around $3,610, and it pays off when one drum makes that whole trip every day. When it does not, a single-purpose pourer or racker is cheaper and better at its one task.

Hazardous areas and weighing change which pourer you buy. Where a drum holds flammable solvent, coating, or fuel, a standard pourer is the wrong tool. The intrinsically-safe scale-equipped vertical-lift pourer, from about $20,900, is built for classified areas: spark-resistant parts and a T-type ULPI scale indicator that is intrinsically safe and approved for many hazardous locations under the National Electrical Code. The scale adds batch weighing right at the pour, with accuracy near plus or minus 0.2 percent, so you dispense to a target weight instead of guessing. If your room is not classified but you still need to weigh, Morse builds scale pourers without the hazardous-area electronics for less. Match the model to the room first, then the power: these run on single or three phase at the voltage and frequency your building supplies, and the wrong spec is a return.