Shed, Power and Machines

Six things to check before you sign

Water is how I learnt to read a shed. In late May 2004, about seven weeks after I signed for my first unit in Bhosari, a pre-monsoon storm came through at four in the afternoon and the floor near the back wall turned into a shallow pond. My kraft paper reels were stacked there. Paper drinks water from the bottom up, like a wick, and by the time I had moved the reels with Vilas's old helper and a borrowed trolley, nine of them had a wet band twenty centimetres high. I lost about ₹38,000 of paper that evening. The landlord said the drain outside had "always been fine". It had always been fine for the man before me, who stored cement bags on pallets.

So rent first. Buying a shed in an industrial estate ties up money you will need for raw material and debtors, and you do not yet know whether the building suits the work. Rent for two or three years, learn what you actually need, then decide. Before you sign, check six things, in person, with a tape measure and a torch.

Floor load. Ask what the floor was laid for, and look at it. Cracks running in straight lines, patches of fresh screed and sunken areas near the shutter all tell you something. A corrugator, a hydraulic press or a stack of filled drums puts weight on a small area. A residential-grade 100 mm slab will crack under a 3-tonne machine within a year, and the landlord will want you to pay for it. If the machine is heavy, budget for a separate foundation and get written permission to cut the floor.

Roof height. Measure it at the lowest point of the truss rather than the peak. Then add up what goes under it: the machine's height, the reach of a chain pulley block for lifting rolls or moulds, and the height you will stack finished goods. I need at least 6 metres clear. Meena, mixing phenyl, can manage with 4.5. A low roof also means a hot roof. In April a tin roof at 4 metres makes the floor about as pleasant as a bakery oven, and people slow down.

Drainage. Walk round the outside. Find where the roof water goes, where the floor washing goes, and how high the plinth stands above the road. If the road is higher than your floor, you are the drain. For a wet process like Meena's, the floor must slope towards a drain point, and that point decides where her mixing tank sits. Her drawing had the tank against the front wall and the only floor trap at the back.

Three-phase supply and sanctioned load. Look at the meter and the electricity bill, and note the sanctioned load in kilowatts. Many sheds show three-phase wires on the pole and a 5 kW connection inside. If your machines need 40 kW, you need an enhancement, and that takes weeks you will be paying rent through. I will come to how many weeks shortly.

Truck access. Stand at the shutter and imagine a 32-foot container backing in. Is the lane wide enough? Is there space to unload without blocking three neighbours? A shed you can only reach with a Tata Ace means every paper delivery gets broken up and handled twice, and you pay for that twice.

The lease itself. Read four clauses slowly: the lock-in period, the annual escalation (5 per cent is normal around Pune, 10 is greedy), who pays for roof and structural repairs, and whether the landlord will sign the consent forms the pollution board and the electricity board ask for. Some landlords refuse to sign anything with "factory" on it. Find out before you hand over the deposit, which in most MIDC estates now runs to between six and ten months' rent.

I went with Meena to see the Satpur shed on a Saturday in late June. The landlord, a pleasant man named Joshi, kept tapping the wall and saying, "Solid construction, madam, RCC." Meena had stopped listening. She was standing at the back with her phone torch pointed at the floor trap, then looking at the front wall, then back at the trap.

"I'll need to redraw it," she said.

The electricity board's calendar

The sanctioned load on my first shed was 7.5 kW. I had worked out that the slotter, the rotary cutter, a stitching machine and the lights would need about 32 kW, and I had assumed, as a former accounts clerk who had never applied for anything bigger than a ration card, that an enhancement was a form and a fee. I applied to MSEDCL, the state distribution company everyone around Pune still calls "the board", in the second week of April 2004. The new load was released on the first of July. Eleven weeks. I paid ₹9,500 a month in rent for every one of them.

Nobody was being lazy. The process simply has more steps than the website suggests, and each step waits for a person. In Maharashtra it runs roughly like this, and most states follow a similar pattern:

1. Online application with the landlord's consent letter, ownership or lease papers, and a test report from a licensed electrical contractor.
2. Site inspection by the section engineer, who checks the wiring and whether the existing transformer can carry you.
3. A demand note: the security deposit and service connection charges, worked out on the new load.
4. Payment, then the work itself: a new meter, sometimes new cable from the pole, sometimes a new transformer.
5. Release of load and a revised bill.

The official timeline for a low-tension connection is a few weeks. The real one depends almost entirely on step two. If the transformer on your lane is already loaded by your neighbours, someone has to augment it or you have to pay for your own, and above a certain load your own transformer becomes compulsory anyway. Ask the section engineer about this before you sign the lease, not after. In my experience a simple enhancement on spare capacity takes four to six weeks. Anything involving a transformer takes three months and sometimes five. I don't know how your state's thresholds sit this year; they change, so ring the local sub-division office and ask a named person.

The contractor I used, Bhosale, put it more bluntly. "Saheb, the form is fast," he said. "The transformer is slow."

What a diesel set really costs

The obvious fix for a long wait is a generator, and I rented one in May 2004: a 62.5 kVA set on a trailer, ₹1,600 a day plus diesel. I ran production on it for three weeks to fill a first small order and then stopped, because I had finally done the arithmetic.

	Grid	Diesel set
Cost per unit (kWh), 2024–25, roughly	₹9 to ₹11	₹26 to ₹32
Cost for 25 kW over an 8-hour shift	about ₹2,000	about ₹5,800

A box sells on a margin of a few rupees. Triple the power cost and most of that margin disappears into the exhaust. Diesel is for running through a cut, never for running a business.

You will still want a set, because rural feeders around Chakan and Shikrapur trip often in the monsoon, and a corrugator that stops halfway leaves you a line full of glued, ruined board. Size it for what must not stop, not for the whole shed. Buy one that meets the current CPCB IV+ emission norms with the acoustic enclosure already fitted, or the pollution officer will ask about it at your consent renewal. A new 30 kVA set costs somewhere between ₹4.5 and ₹6 lakh today. Second-hand ones without the right compliance papers are cheaper for a reason.

Two smaller points that cost owners money every month. Ask the contractor to fit a capacitor panel, because a poor power factor brings a penalty on the bill, and motors running half-loaded make it worse. And read your bill line by line once a quarter. In 2009 I found I had been paying for a demand charge on a load I no longer used. Fourteen months of it.

Meena's phenyl unit needed only about 10 kW: a stirrer motor, a transfer pump, a filling machine, lights. The Satpur shed already had 15. She rang me from outside it, sounding almost disappointed.

"So I don't have to wait for anything?"

"Not for power," I said. "Ask Joshi about the water connection."

Someone else's machine

Every second-hand machine has a story about why it is for sale, and the seller will tell you a nicer one than the truth. Vilas's slotter was honest enough: its owner had run out of cash, not out of luck with the machine. That is the best reason a machine can come to market. The worst is that it has been quietly ruining work for two years and the owner has finally found someone who does not know.

The three markets I know reasonably well sort themselves by trade. Ludhiana for lathes, presses, knitting and general workshop machines. Rajkot for CNC lathes, pumps, plastic moulding and anything to do with engines. Coimbatore for textile machinery, pumps, motors and foundry equipment. Corrugation machinery turns up in all three, and in Delhi's Mayapuri and Pune's own scrap yards around Kasarwadi. Prices in these places are often 40 to 60 per cent of new. That gap is the whole temptation.

In September 2006 I found a single-facer corrugator in Ludhiana, at a unit on Focal Point Phase VIII that was moving to a bigger line. Asking price ₹6.5 lakh, settled at ₹6 lakh. A new one from a Pune maker was quoting about ₹14 lakh then. I was ready to pay over the phone.

Instead I paid ₹4,000, plus a train ticket, to Shinde, a fitter who had retired from a Bhosari machine builder after thirty-one years of assembling exactly these machines. He spent four hours on it. He brought a dial gauge, a torch, a magnet and a rag.

What Shinde checked

• Run it under load, with your material. A machine that runs empty proves only that the motor turns. Shinde made them feed our own kraft through it for twenty minutes.
• Roll wear. He put the dial gauge on the corrugating rolls. The flutes were worn unevenly, deeper at one end. Regrinding would cost about ₹70,000.
• Gearbox oil. He drained a little into a cup and held the magnet in it. Fine grey paste means teeth are wearing. Bright flakes mean something has already broken.
• Bearings. He put a screwdriver tip on each housing and his ear to the handle. Old fitters' stethoscope.
• The frame. He looked for weld lines under the paint. Cracked castings that have been welded rarely stay straight.
• The motor nameplate. A motor rewound by a local shop often loses efficiency. Ask for the rewinding bill; if nobody has one, assume the worst.

He found the roll wear and a steam joint that leaked. I went back to the seller and got the price down by ₹85,000, which paid for Shinde roughly twenty times over.

What to walk away from

Fresh paint. A machine painted last week is hiding something more often than not. No maker's plate. You will never find spares, and the bank's valuer will not like it either. Makers who have shut down, unless you can see the spare parts with your own eyes. "Running condition" with no power connected. If it cannot be switched on where it stands, it is scrap until proved otherwise.

Then the paperwork. Insist on a proper GST invoice, because your bank will want one, and so will your CA when he claims depreciation. Most banks financing used machinery also ask for a valuation from a chartered engineer, which costs ₹8,000 to ₹15,000 and takes a week. Budget for loading, transport and a crane at both ends. That Ludhiana corrugator cost me ₹38,000 to reach Bhosari by truck in 2006, and one wheel of the trailer nearly went into a ditch outside Panipat.

The machine ran for fourteen years. Shinde came to see it every year at Diwali, put the screwdriver to the bearings, and said nothing unless something was wrong.

Draw the paper first

The first floor I laid out was in a 2,400 square foot shed on a lane behind the Bhosari telephone exchange, in April 2004, and I did it the way most new owners do. I stood in the empty shed with Vilas's two machines on a truck outside and asked the driver where they would fit. The slotter went against the long wall because that was where the power point was. The rotary cutter went near the door because it was heavier and the crane could not reach further in. The kraft reels went wherever there was floor left.

It worked, in the sense that boxes came out. It also meant that every reel travelled past the finished stock to reach the cutter, every cut sheet came back past the reels to reach the slotter, and the finished bundles then went the length of the shed a third time to reach the loading door, which was the same door the reels came in through. Raw paper and packed boxes met in the doorway every afternoon. My helper Ganesh, who joined in 2005, called that corner "chowk", the crossroads, and he was not being affectionate.

When the Ludhiana corrugator arrived in 2006 there was no sensible place left to put it, so I did the thing I should have done two years earlier. I took a sheet of graph paper, one square to a foot, and drew the path the material takes before drawing a single machine.

One direction, one door in, one door out

The rule is simple enough to fit on a matchbox. Material should move in one direction and never cross its own path. Reels come in at one end. They are corrugated, pasted, cut, printed, slotted, stitched or glued, counted, bundled and dispatched, and each step should sit next to the one after it. If your shed has two doors, raw material uses one and finished goods use the other. If it has one door, you plan a U-shape, in on the left and out on the right, with an aisle down the middle that nothing is allowed to stand in.

Before you draw, write down three things for each machine:

• its footprint, plus at least a metre of working space on the operator's side
• where its input arrives and where its output leaves
• what it needs from the walls: three-phase supply, water, a drain, an exhaust

Then measure the shed yourself. Landlords' drawings are aspirational.

I redrew the Bhosari floor in February 2007 and moved two machines over a Sunday. Before the move I asked the forklift operator, Suresh, to make a tally mark on a card each time he lifted something. He averaged 146 lifts a day across the shift. Three weeks after the move he was averaging 88. Call it forty per cent. Nobody worked harder. The material just stopped going for walks.

Leave space for the machine you will buy in three years. I did not, and the printer I bought in 2010 sits at an angle that still annoys me.

The tank in the corner

Meena sent me her Satpur floor plan again in the first week of July, this time drawn properly on graph paper by her son, with the shed's real measurements. The mixing tank had moved. In her first drawing it stood in the far corner from the door, which meant the empty drums would come in, cross the shed to be filled, and travel back full, roughly 200 kilograms each, past the filling machine and the labelling table. Her husband had pointed out that she would be rolling drums of phenyl past the place where people stood.

Now the raw chemicals came in at the door and went straight to a storage rack, then to the tank, the filling machine, labelling, cartons, and a stacking area by the shutter. Every arrow went one way. Joshi had agreed to put a drain under the tank. The water connection would be live by the twentieth.

"So when do I switch it on?" she said, when she rang.

"When you have written down what you will check before the first litre goes into a bottle," I said. "And bring a notebook for the scrap."

She laughed, because she thought I was joking. Her first batch was set for 28 July.