Your latest large shop purchase came in a crate secured with steel straps. Swearing, you go look for some snips that are hard enough to actually cut the straps. Sure they can be tough to remove, but that’s the point. Now you find yourself wondering how they put the straps on in the first place.

Generally you need two tools to apply steel strapping: a tensioner and a sealer. You use the tensioner to take up the tension and hold the strapping while you use the sealer to crimp the seal in place. Of course if you ship a large volume of similar products, you could always buy a dedicated machine such as the large coil strapping machine pictured above.