Ryan Smith, Production Manager at J.S. McCarthy Packaging, shares how the W.H. Leary glue system helped us run faster on our BOBST folder-gluers without sacrificing quality.
Watch our production team walk through the upgrade, and see a True Citrus carton job run at full speed.
At J.S. McCarthy Packaging, folding cartons are what we do, and we keep investing to produce them faster and better. Over the past few years, that's meant significant upgrades to the technology behind our BOBST folder-gluers. Batch inverters, automated feeding, and a CartonPack system have removed bottlenecks at the start and end of the production line. But as those upgrades unlocked more speed, one part of the process became the limiting factor: glue application and quality inspection.
“We recognized that the current systems that we had on those machines were not going to take the pace and the speed that these other upgrades were going to afford to us,” Ryan Smith explained.
So we made a change. After evaluating several suppliers, J.S. McCarthy selected W.H. Leary, installing Sempre-i cold glue valves, glue inspection, barcode verification, and Monet operating software. Today, the Leary system runs on all three of our folder-gluers.
J.S. McCarthy operates three BOBST folder-gluers, producing primarily straight-line and auto-bottom cartons. As we've pushed for more speed on those lines, one upgrade in particular changed everything.
Adding a CartonPack 4 doubled the speed of that line. “There's just no way that would've happened with the old glue system that we had on there,” Smith said.
That speed exposed real limitations in the old equipment. The previous piston-driven glue valves struggled at higher cycle rates, where heat could affect the adhesive and lead to inconsistent application. Inspection was another concern: the old system only checked the beginning and end of the glue pattern, offering little assurance about what happened in between, at a time when increased automation meant less manual product handling to catch problems. Replacement sensors were also costly, often representing a significant share of the original system's cost.
We needed a system that could keep pace with an increasingly automated line while actually improving quality assurance, not just maintaining it.
Leary equipped our folder-gluer with four Sempre-i cold glue valves, along with glue inspection and barcode verification. The Sempre-i technology delivered the high-speed application we needed to take full advantage of the productivity gains happening elsewhere on the line.
Just as valuable was the inspection upgrade, including glue volume control.
“We didn't even know that the volume control was an option,” Smith said. “When we learned it, we implemented it, and it's been great.”
That extra layer of inspection mattered more than expected. Before automating the line, operators hand-inspected cartons throughout production. With CartonPack and Leary's systems working together, we now lean much more heavily on automated quality assurance, and the results back it up: since the first system was installed in June 2025, we've had no glue failures, no customer complaints, and no quality issues from that gluer and system.
For the video, we ran a True Citrus carton job on one of our Leary-equipped folder-gluers. At its fastest, the gluer ran 115,000 cartons an hour, more than 1,900 every minute, with every carton checked for glue placement and barcode accuracy as it ran.
Across the full job, including makeready and stoppages, we produced 2,509,200 cartons in just over 38 hours.
One of the most noticeable day-to-day improvements has been CleanStart, a Sempre-i feature that eliminates routine valve purging.
With the old system, every stoppage meant maintenance. A 15-minute break meant purging each valve before restarting, across four valves, multiple shifts, and three folder-gluers. That added up fast, both in downtime and in wasted adhesive collected in trays below the equipment.
“If we started Monday with a clean paint tray, the paint tray would be completely full of adhesive by Friday,” Smith said.
CleanStart changed that. “With the CleanStart system, you could literally stop running this gluer on Friday, show up Monday morning, fire it up, and you don't purge anything.” As Smith put it: “CleanStart looks so simple, but it's a game changer, 100%.”
We're now tracking adhesive consumption to quantify the savings, but the difference is already visible on the floor: the trays that used to fill up with purged adhesive simply aren't part of the routine anymore.
Adopting any new platform takes an adjustment, especially for experienced operators who know glue application inside and out but are used to a different interface. Leary supported our team through the transition with on-site training, and once operators got comfortable, the feedback was clear.
“The Leary system, the interface, is much easier to navigate,” Smith said. Monet's visual, image-driven design helps operators find functions quickly, and built-in help features answer questions right from the touchscreen. “It's more image driven, and you've got the question mark where you can click on something when you don't know what it means. It's just pretty straightforward.”
For Leary, the relationship goes both ways.
What started as a glue and inspection system replacement has become part of J.S. McCarthy's broader strategy for growing our folding carton business. With the third Leary system added this fall, all three of our BOBST folder-gluers now run on the same platform, and we're preparing for additional automation ahead.
The reliability has held up too. Since our first Leary system went in, we haven't had to replace a single iTac inspection sensor, and outside of ordering different nozzle sizes for varying adhesive viscosities, we haven't needed replacement parts.
The result: we can run faster, automate more, and stay confident that every carton leaving the folder-gluer meets our standards.
Have a carton project coming up? Contact us to talk it through.
