Alkon Mammoth Bins in India: Mesh vs Solid at 820 x 315 x 300 mm
The Mammoth is the largest bin in the Alkon material handling range: 820 x 315 x 300 mm on the outside, 740 x 250 x 290 mm on the inside, moulded in polypropylene copolymer and offered in a mesh version and a solid version. That one choice between mesh and solid changes how the bin drains, how quickly parts dry, how heavy it becomes when somebody fills it to the brim, whether it needs a stand or a trolley, and whether you should have bought a pallet position instead. This page works through all of it with the real numbers, written for the purchase, stores and production people who have to live with the decision. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has stocked the range from Vashi, Navi Mumbai for over thirty years, and these are the questions that come across the counter.
What the Alkon Mammoth Bin actually is
Alkon Plastics Pvt. Ltd. describes itself as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India, and the Mammoth sits at the top of that range by sheer size. The outside envelope is 820 x 315 x 300 mm and the moulded cavity is 740 x 250 x 290 mm, which is the difference between the box you handle and the space you can actually fill. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has been an authorised stockist of the Alkon range for over thirty years from Shop-1, Gagangiri Chs, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai, and the Mammoth is one of the few items customers ask for by name rather than by part code.
Multiply the internal figures and the Mammoth gives 53.65 litres of usable cube. That number belongs on the purchase note, because it is the one that catches people out. An Alkon Tote AK-421 holds about 7.5 litres inside its 365 x 230 x 90 mm cavity, so a single Mammoth swallows roughly seven totes. A Supra SB 1, at 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside, holds under half a litre, so one Mammoth is the volumetric equivalent of more than a hundred of them. A bin that replaces a hundred small bins also replaces a hundred small weights with one large one, and that is the whole story of the Mammoth in a sentence.
The Mammoth comes as mesh and as solid. These are not two quality grades and they are not a good-and-better pair. They are two answers to one question: should air, water, oil, dust, light and small loose pieces be allowed to pass through the wall of the bin, or be kept inside it? Everything else is common to both versions. Same 820 x 315 x 300 mm envelope, same polypropylene copolymer, same resin 05 marking, same -10 C to +70 C service range, same food-safe and recyclable marks. Choosing wrongly rarely shows up on day one. It shows up in the third monsoon, or the first time somebody hoses down a full bin.
In practice the Mammoth is a bulk storage bin for material that is too bulky, too awkward or too numerous for a shelf bin, but not heavy or tall enough to justify a pallet position. Sheet-metal pressings, moulded housings, rubber components, rough castings waiting for machining, harness sub-assemblies, preforms, packaging inserts and returnable parts moving between two cells all sit in that bracket. If your components are small and loose, the Alkon Bull Bins for smaller loose components are the better starting point, and the Panda and Koala shelf ranges take over below that again.
- Hippo 612/T - 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside, about 0.31 litres inside
- Rhino ARTB-05 - 109 x 104 x 49 mm outside, about 0.36 litres inside
- Supra SB 1 - 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside, about 0.49 litres inside
- Koala AKP-01 - 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside, about 0.52 litres inside
- Bull Bin 5 - 168 x 102 x 74 mm outside, about 0.82 litres inside
- Panda Shelf Bin 301 - 315 x 100 x 60 mm outside, about 1.39 litres inside
- Tote AK-421 - 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside, about 7.5 litres inside
- Mammoth - 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside, about 53.65 litres inside
Reading 820 x 315 x 300 mm before you draw the layout
The gap between 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside and 740 x 250 x 290 mm inside is not wasted plastic. Eighty millimetres go out of the length and sixty-five out of the width because the walls carry the load, the rim carries the handling and the base carries whatever the bin is standing on. When you plan a rack level, an aisle, a trolley deck or a truck, you must work from the outside figures. When you plan what goes into the bin, you must work from the inside figures. A surprising share of the layout mistakes we see in stores drawings come from one set of numbers being used for both jobs.
The longest straight part that will lie flat in a Mammoth is 740 mm, and in practice a little less, because nothing ever gets placed perfectly square. The flat diagonal of the 740 x 250 mm floor is about 781 mm, but a part lying corner to corner cannot be stacked on and cannot be picked cleanly, so treat 740 mm as the absolute limit and 730 mm as the comfortable working figure. Once your part is longer than that, the bin stops being a bin and becomes a tray you fight with every shift, and a shelf level or a pallet with edge protection will serve you better.
The internal depth of 290 mm is deep enough to be a genuine ergonomic factor rather than a specification detail. An operator taking the last few pieces from the bottom of a Mammoth standing on the floor is bending from the waist with an outstretched arm, and that is the posture that produces back complaints on a busy line in Chakan or Manesar long before anybody blames the bin. At roughly waist height on a stand the same bin is comfortable to work from all day. Above shoulder height it becomes unsafe, because the picker cannot see the bottom and is lifting a load he cannot judge.
Orientation matters more than most stores teams realise. Placed with the 820 mm side across the pick face, the entire opening is presented to the operator and nothing is more than about 315 mm away. Placed with the 820 mm side running front to back, which is what happens when bins are simply pushed into a deep rack, the far 400 mm becomes the place where stock goes to die. Older lots settle at the back, FIFO quietly stops working, and the annual physical count turns up material nobody has issued for two years. If you are still sizing the fleet, our guide on how to choose the right storage bin size covers the same arithmetic across the smaller ranges.
- Layout, racking, trolleys and truck cube: use 820 x 315 x 300 mm
- Part fit, fill height and capacity: use 740 x 250 x 290 mm
- Longest part that lies flat: 730 to 740 mm
- Usable cube: 53.65 litres, or 0.185 litres per millimetre of fill height
- Pick face: keep the 820 mm side across the operator, not front to back
Mammoth bins mesh or solid: making the call properly
Start with the material, not with the bin. Write down what actually leaves the part while it is sitting in storage: water from a wash, coolant from a machining operation, oil from a dip, cutting fines, sand from a casting, moisture from ambient humidity, or nothing at all. Then write down what could get into the part: dust from a grinding bay, swarf blowing off a neighbouring machine, water from a floor wash, sunlight. Mesh lets both flows happen. Solid stops both. Almost every mesh-versus-solid argument dissolves once those two lists are on paper in front of the stores in-charge.
The second question is about what can escape. Mammoth bins mesh versions are excellent for anything that is bigger than the aperture and useless for anything that is not. Washers, clips, small springs, moulding sprues, off-cuts and broken pieces are the usual culprits, and they never announce themselves at the trial stage because trials are run with good parts. Before you commit a large order, ask us for the aperture on the current mesh moulding and test with the smallest and thinnest item in the family, not the representative one. A bin that leaks two components per shift is an inventory problem you will chase for years.
Third, consider what the operator needs to see. A mesh wall shows the level from the aisle without anybody lifting or tipping anything, which is genuinely useful on a kanban loop where a runner has to judge replenishment at a glance while walking past twenty locations. A solid wall shows nothing from the side but takes a printed label, a label pocket or a colour band cleanly, and keeps that label legible after a year of handling. Many plants settle this by using mesh where the level drives the replenishment and solid where the label drives the picking.
Finally, think about the room the bins live in. In a coastal plant in Navi Mumbai, Chennai or Kolkata, ambient humidity does most of the damage and mesh airflow helps ferrous parts survive the monsoon. In a dusty grinding or fettling shop in Rajkot or Coimbatore, mesh simply invites the shop into the bin, and solid is the right call. In a clean assembly hall in Bengaluru or Hyderabad, the deciding factor is usually surface protection rather than airflow. There is no universally correct answer, which is why most plants of any size end up running a mixed fleet with a clear colour convention.
- Choose mesh when parts arrive wet, oily or hot and must drain, dry or cool
- Choose mesh when the stock level must be readable from the aisle
- Choose solid when anything in the bin can pass through an open grid
- Choose solid when drips must not reach the floor or the stock below
- Choose solid when the surface finish must never touch an open lattice
- Never decide from a sample of good parts alone - test with the smallest and the broken ones
Ventilation, drainage and drying: what the mesh is really for
The clearest case for mesh is the washed part. Components that come out of an aqueous wash carry a film of water into storage, and in a solid bin that water has nowhere to go. It collects at the base, the lowest layer of parts sits in it, and by the next shift you have surface rust on machined faces that were clean when they left the wash. A mesh Mammoth lets the bulk of that water drain and lets air move through the load, so parts dry in a fraction of the time. On a wet-to-dry buffer this single change removes an entire category of rework.
Machined parts carrying coolant behave the same way, with one extra complication that is easy to forget when you are drawing the layout. Coolant that drains out of a mesh bin has to land somewhere. If the bin is on a rack, it lands on the stock below, and if the bin is on the floor it makes an aisle slippery. The correct arrangement is a dedicated wet-buffer area with a drip tray or a bunded floor under the mesh bins, and dry racking elsewhere. Plants that put mesh bins straight into general racking usually reverse the decision within a month, for the wrong reason.
Heat is the third flow the mesh handles. Parts coming off forging, moulding, heat treatment or a hot wash are frequently still well above ambient when somebody is under pressure to move them, and the polypropylene copolymer here has a stated service range that tops out at +70 C. Mesh dissipates residual heat much faster than a solid wall, which reduces the risk of a hot load sitting against one panel and softening it. That is a mitigation, not a licence - parts should still be brought below the limit before they go into any bin, and a written cooling step is worth more than the choice of wall.
The last benefit is inspection. With a mesh Mammoth you can see contamination, mixed parts, water at the base or a damaged item without unloading anything, and a supervisor walking a line in a Pune or Nashik plant can audit twenty locations in the time it takes to open three solid bins. Against that, mesh gives dust and fines a free path in both directions, and it gives you no way to keep a desiccant pouch or an oiled paper wrap doing its job. Ventilation is a real advantage, but it is an advantage only where something actually needs to breathe.
Where a solid Mammoth bin is the only sensible answer
The first case is containment of small or fine material. A solid Mammoth bin holds granules, pellets, powders, small mouldings, cut lengths, fasteners in a bag, laundry, textile off-cuts and food ingredients without anything working its way out during handling or transport. Anything that can find a gap eventually will, especially on a trolley crossing floor joints or riding a tail-lift. If your bin will be moved regularly with mixed contents, solid removes an entire class of losses that nobody ever quantifies because the parts vanish one at a time.
The second case is surface protection. Painted panels, plated hardware, polished trim, anodised extrusions, optical parts and soft plastic mouldings do not do well resting against an open lattice, because contact pressure concentrates on the lattice edges and can print a pattern into a soft or freshly finished surface. A solid wall gives a continuous bearing surface and takes a foam or board liner cleanly if you need one. For finished-goods buffers in electronics and appliance plants around Bengaluru, Chennai and Delhi NCR, this is usually the deciding argument, well ahead of drainage.
The third case is control of the environment inside the bin. Solid walls keep out grinding dust, weld spatter carried on air currents, and the general fallout of a fettling or fabrication bay, and they let you cover a bin properly for transit. They also give you a clean, flat, continuous face for labels, lot cards, barcodes and colour bands that stays legible and stays attached. Where a food-safe or hygiene-sensitive product is involved, solid is nearly always the right choice, because a smooth wall is far easier to clean to a documented standard than an open grid.
Handling weight: fill to a weight budget, not to the brim
The single most useful thing to understand about a 53.65 litre bin is that its cube will happily outrun what a human being can lift. The internal floor is 740 x 250 mm, which works out to 0.185 litres for every millimetre of fill height. Take a common bulk density, multiply, and the answer is often uncomfortable. Loose steel fasteners run at roughly 4 to 4.5 kg per litre once you allow for the air between them, so a 15 kg limit is reached at about 20 mm of fill in a 290 mm deep bin. That is not a bin problem; it is a signal that the Mammoth is the wrong bin for that material.
Run the same arithmetic for the materials the Mammoth is genuinely meant for and the picture is very different. Light plastic mouldings at about 0.15 kg per litre fill the bin completely and still come to around 8 kg. Rubber components at 0.4 kg per litre reach roughly 21 kg full, which is already a two-person or trolley load. Aluminium castings at about 1.0 kg per litre hit 15 kg at around 81 mm of fill and would be over 50 kg if anybody filled the bin. The rule that falls out of this is simple: heavier the material, lower the fill line, and there is no shame in a big bin that is deliberately used shallow.
The 820 mm length has its own effect on handling that the weight figure alone does not capture. The hand positions are far apart, so the load sits well away from the body and the carrier cannot bring it close the way he would with a tote. Twenty kilograms in a Mammoth is harder work than twenty kilograms in an AK-421, and the risk is not the weight but the awkwardness and the temptation to drag or swing the bin. This is why bins of this size deserve a stand, a trolley or a cart as part of the original purchase rather than as an afterthought six months later.
The practical control is a marked fill line rather than a written instruction. Decide the weight budget with your safety officer, convert it to a height in millimetres using 0.185 litres per millimetre and your material's bulk density, then mark that height inside the bin or on a label at the rim. Operators cannot judge kilograms by eye but they can judge a line. Plants that do this find that the same bin can serve a light and a heavy SKU with two different lines and two colour codes, which is far cheaper than buying two different bin sizes.
- Fill height maths: 0.185 litres per mm of height, 53.65 litres at full 290 mm
- Light plastic mouldings, about 0.15 kg/litre - full bin is roughly 8 kg
- Rubber and dense mouldings, about 0.4 kg/litre - 15 kg at about 200 mm fill
- Aluminium castings, about 1.0 kg/litre - 15 kg at about 81 mm fill
- Loose steel hardware, 4 to 4.5 kg/litre - 15 kg at under 20 mm fill, use a smaller bin
- Convert every weight limit into a millimetre mark the operator can actually see
Stands, trolleys, rails and crash carts for a bin this size
Getting a Mammoth off the floor is the cheapest ergonomics improvement available to most stores. A bin at floor level forces a full bend for every pick, and a bin at 700 to 900 mm presents its opening at a natural working height. The Alkon accessories list carries partitions, louvre panels, stands, trolleys, rails, a universal rail and crash carts, and these are shared across the ranges rather than being specific to one bin. Before you design a layout around any of them, confirm with us which are dimensioned for the 820 x 315 mm Mammoth footprint, because assuming compatibility is the most common cause of an accessory sitting unused in a corner.
For anything that moves, the wheels matter more than the frame. Indian factory floors have expansion joints, ramps at shipping doors, drain channels and the occasional patch of broken concrete, and a small hard castor will find every one of them. Larger diameter wheels roll over joints instead of stopping dead against them, which is what makes a loaded trolley tip. Specify at least two braked castors, check that the deck supports the full 820 x 315 mm base rather than just the ends, and set a house rule that a loaded bin is never pushed by a single person on a ramp.
For line-side feed, the useful arrangements are a rail system that presents the bin at the operator's working height, a crash cart that carries a set of bins to the station as one move, and a simple stand where a single large bin serves one workstation for a full shift. The thing to protect against is stacking loaded bins into a column just because the floor is crowded. A tall stack of large, heavy, plastic boxes is unstable when it is nudged by a pallet truck, and the cost of a fallen stack is measured in scrapped parts and injuries rather than in bins.
Racking and aisles: how many Mammoths fit where
The 820 x 315 mm footprint is not pallet-modular, and that catches people out when they try to build a pallet load of bins. On a 1200 x 1000 mm pallet you can lay three Mammoths per layer, leaving a strip too narrow to use. On a 1200 x 800 mm pallet you get two. Neither is efficient, which is a fair signal that the Mammoth is designed to be handled and stored as a bin rather than unitised onto pallets. If your material really wants to travel palletised, that is a hint the material may belong on a pallet in the first place.
Racking is where the size works properly. Stand the bins with the 820 mm length running into the depth of the rack and the 315 mm width across the beam, and a 2700 mm clear beam takes seven bins with comfortable hand clearance between them, or eight if you accept narrow gaps. Seven bins at 53.65 litres each gives roughly 375 litres of stored material on a single level with every bin accessible from the aisle. The essential condition is that the level must be fully decked with a shelf panel or mesh decking - an 820 mm bin base resting on two bare beams is not a supported load.
Two more layout points are worth writing into the drawing. First, keep the top row of Mammoths below shoulder height for anything an operator handles by hand, because the combination of size and weight makes a high retrieval genuinely dangerous. Second, protect the rack uprights at the aisle ends, since bins of this size are usually moved with trolleys and pallet trucks in the same aisles, and the Visipro rack protectors on our storage systems pages exist precisely for that. The same reasoning applies right across the wider warehouse storage bins range used across India, but it bites hardest at Mammoth size.
- 1200 x 1000 mm pallet: three Mammoths per layer, with waste
- 1200 x 800 mm pallet: two Mammoths per layer
- 2700 mm clear beam: seven bins with hand clearance, eight if gaps are tight
- One decked level of seven bins: about 375 litres of stored material
- Always deck the level - never rest an 820 mm base on two bare beams
- Keep hand-picked Mammoths below shoulder height
Polypropylene copolymer, resin 05 and the -10 C to +70 C window
Every bin range here is moulded in polypropylene copolymer and carries resin code 05, the food-safe mark and the recyclable mark. Polypropylene copolymer is chosen for this kind of work because it takes repeated knocks better than a homopolymer, it does not absorb water, it shrugs off most oils, coolants, dilute acids and alkalis found on a shop floor, and it can be reground and recycled at end of life. The resin 05 marking matters at that last stage: it tells your waste contractor exactly what the item is, which is what turns a scrapped bin into a recyclable rather than landfill.
The low end of the service range is -10 C. In most Indian plants that limit never comes into play, but two situations do reach it. Cold rooms and chilled storage sit inside the window comfortably, while a frozen store at -18 C or below does not, and that is a hard line rather than a matter of degree. The other case is a winter morning in Delhi NCR or a north Indian yard, where an unheated shed can get cold enough that plastic is at its most brittle, and a bin dropped from a truck bed at seven in the morning behaves differently from the same bin at noon.
The high end, +70 C, comes up far more often. Parts coming off forging, moulding, heat treatment or paint cure should be allowed to cool below it before binning, hot wash tanks running at 80 to 85 C will distort a batch of bins in a single cycle, and a steam lance held close to a wall can put a permanent bow in the panel. Ambient heat matters too: bins left in a closed truck or in open sun in an Ahmedabad or Rajkot summer can climb well above the temperature of the air around them, particularly if they are dark coloured and loaded. Store bins under cover.
Chemical exposure is the quiet one. Polypropylene handles the everyday shop-floor mix well, but aggressive solvents, thinners, aerosol brake cleaners and strong oxidising agents can craze or soften the surface, and crazing is what turns a knock into a crack a few months later. Prolonged direct sunlight has the same slow effect through UV exposure. If bins are used in a paint shop, a chemical store or an outdoor yard, say so at the enquiry stage so the right colour and the right storage arrangement can be discussed rather than discovered.
When a pallet beats a bin
This is the question a Mammoth forces, because at 820 x 315 x 300 mm it sits right on the boundary between bin storage and pallet storage. The economics are worth stating plainly. A pallet position in a racked warehouse costs the same whether you put a full pallet in it or three bins, so if a location can be filled by a single palletised unit load that is moved entirely by forklift, bins are adding handling steps and cost. The bin only earns its place when human hands, partial quantities or lot separation are involved somewhere in the cycle.
There is a second cost that rarely appears in any comparison, which is decanting. Every time material arrives palletised from a supplier and gets transferred into bins, somebody is paid to move it twice and there is an opportunity to miscount, mix lots or damage a surface. If nothing downstream benefits from that transfer, do not do it. The honest test is to ask what the next operation actually needs. If it needs a person to pick five pieces at a time, bins win. If it needs a forklift to take the whole lot to a machine, the pallet wins.
The Mammoth is at its strongest in exactly the space between those cases: work in progress moving between cells in small lots, buffer stock ahead of a manual operation, kitted sets for an assembly station, returnable packaging on a short milk run between two units in the same industrial estate, and parts that must be kept in separate lots for traceability. In each of those, bulk storage bins beat a pallet because a pallet cannot be picked from by hand without becoming untidy, and because a pallet load cannot be split cleanly.
Most plants end up with both, and the discipline is to write down the rule rather than leave it to whoever is on shift. A single line in the stores SOP - anything above this weight, longer than this length, or turning over faster than this rate goes on a pallet, everything else goes in a Mammoth - prevents years of drift. The rules below are the ones we see working in engineering plants from Pimpri to Hosur, and they are worth adapting rather than copying, because the weight limits should reflect your own material handling policy.
- Pallet wins: part longer than about 730 mm, or taller than the bin
- Pallet wins: whole-lot forklift movement with no manual picking in between
- Pallet wins: material arrives palletised and decanting adds nothing
- Pallet wins: turnover above roughly a bin or two per shift for one SKU
- Bin wins: partial quantities, hand picking, kitting and line-side feed
- Bin wins: lot separation, honest FIFO and short returnable loops
- Bin wins: parts that would be crushed or scratched in a stacked pallet load
How Mammoth bins get damaged, and how to stop it
The most common damage is mechanical and entirely avoidable. Forklift tine strikes on bins stored at ground level, dragging a loaded bin across rough concrete instead of lifting or trolleying it, and dropping a bin from a truck bed onto a hard yard account for most of what we see. A dragged base wears thin at the corners first, and a worn corner is where the next crack starts. The corrective actions are boring and effective: mark ground-level bin positions clearly, keep them out of tine paths, protect the uprights, and give every regularly moved bin a trolley.
The second group is load related. A large bin filled with dense material has a long, heavily loaded span, and the failure is usually gradual - the base bows, the bin no longer sits flat, it rocks on the shelf, and the stress concentrates at the same points every time it is handled. Stacking loaded bins several high accelerates all of this and adds instability. The remedy is the fill line described earlier and a written limit on how many loaded bins may be stacked, which should be a small number and should be enforced by supervisors rather than by hope.
The third group is thermal and chemical. Hot swarf or grinding sparks landing in a bin will melt a hole in polypropylene, hot parts binned before cooling will soften a panel, a close-range steam lance will deform a wall, and solvent contact will craze a surface that then cracks later. Once a bin has any crack, retire it: a crack in a loaded plastic bin propagates, and the failure comes when someone is carrying it. The resin 05 marking makes the retired bin easy to route into recycling, so there is no reason to keep a damaged one in service.
- Monthly walk: check base corners for abrasion and thinning
- Check rims and hand positions for stress whitening or hairline cracks
- Look for bases that no longer sit flat - that is a bowed, overloaded bin
- Check mesh bins for bent or broken lattice sections that can snag hands
- Any crack, however small: withdraw from service and send to recycling
- Record which area produced the damage - the pattern usually points to one aisle
Cleaning, labelling and a routine that survives the monsoon
Cleaning is straightforward provided the temperature limit is respected. Warm water below 70 C, a mild alkaline detergent, a soft brush and a rinse deals with dust, coolant residue, oil film and general shop-floor grime. Avoid solvents, thinners and aerosol cleaners, which craze the surface, and avoid holding a steam lance close to a panel. Dry the bins inverted so water cannot sit in the base, and expect the mesh version to dry in a fraction of the time the solid one takes - which is a genuine operational advantage during a Mumbai or Kolkata monsoon when nothing air-dries quickly.
Labelling deserves a decision rather than a habit. A solid wall gives you a clean, flat, continuous surface for a printed label, a label pocket or a colour band, and that label survives handling and stays scannable. A mesh wall does not, so plan on a tie-on card or a clip-on holder from the start rather than improvising with tape that peels within a week. Whichever you choose, keep the label on the 315 mm end face if bins go into racking nose-in, and on the 820 mm face if they are presented broadside, so the picker always reads from the aisle.
The routine that keeps a fleet healthy is short. Wash on a fixed cycle rather than when somebody notices, inspect at the same time using the checklist above, keep a small float of spare bins - five to ten per cent of the fleet is usually enough - so a damaged bin can be pulled immediately instead of limping on, and hold a rough count by area so you know when a department is quietly losing bins. Before the monsoon, pull mesh bins holding ferrous parts out of any location where floor water can splash, and check that wet-buffer drip trays are actually draining.
- Wash water and detergent solution: keep below 70 C, always
- No solvents, thinners or aerosol cleaners on any bin surface
- Dry inverted; allow extra drying time for solid bins in humid weather
- Solid bins take adhesive labels and pockets; mesh bins need tie-on or clip-on cards
- Hold a five to ten per cent float so damaged bins can be withdrawn at once
Specifying and buying Alkon Mammoth Bins in India
A good enquiry saves a bad delivery. Tell us the material going into the bin and its rough bulk density, the smallest loose item in that family, whether the parts arrive wet, oily or hot, whether the bin will sit on the floor, on a stand, on a trolley or in racking, and the clear beam length and depth of that racking. From that we can tell you whether mesh or solid is right, how many bins fit per level, what fill height corresponds to your weight limit, and whether the Mammoth is even the correct member of the range for the job. The catalogue runs to over 476 products across nine ranges, so there is usually a better fit than the obvious one.
Trial before you commit. Take one mesh and one solid Mammoth into the actual area for two weeks with real material, real operators and a real wash cycle, and watch for three things: whether anything falls through, whether the filled weight is what you assumed, and whether the bin fits the movement pattern without anybody dragging or stacking it. Two bins on trial will teach you more than any specification sheet, and it costs almost nothing compared with discovering the problem after a fleet order has been delivered to a plant in Coimbatore or Nashik.
On commercials, the practical points are freight cube, lead time and quantity. An 820 x 315 x 300 mm bin is bulky rather than heavy, so transport is priced on volume, and the delivered cost per bin from Navi Mumbai to Gujarat, Karnataka or Tamil Nadu is driven by how many go into a truck. Ask us to confirm how the version you have chosen packs for transport before you finalise quantities, and consolidate accessories into the same despatch. Dimension sheets for the range are on our downloads page, application notes by sector are under industries, and the background on Alkon as an industrial storage bins manufacturer sits on its own page.
- Send us: material, bulk density, smallest loose item, wet or dry, hot or ambient
- Send us: storage method - floor, stand, trolley or racking - with beam length and depth
- Ask for: mesh aperture, accessory compatibility with the 820 x 315 mm footprint, transport packing
- Trial one mesh and one solid bin in the actual area before ordering a fleet
- Order stands or trolleys with the bins, not six months later
- Shreeram Metafusion, Sector 17 Vashi, Navi Mumbai 400703 - 93266 29967 / 98201 01937, enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com, Mon-Sat 10:00-19:00
Frequently asked questions
What are the exact dimensions and capacity of an Alkon Mammoth Bin?
The Mammoth measures 820 x 315 x 300 mm on the outside and 740 x 250 x 290 mm on the inside. Use the outside figures for rack levels, trolley decks, aisle clearance and truck loading, and the inside figures for anything to do with what the bin holds. Multiplying the internal numbers gives 53.65 litres of cube, and the internal floor of 740 x 250 mm works out to 0.185 litres for every millimetre of fill height, which is the figure you need when you are deciding how high to fill a heavy material. Both the mesh and the solid versions share this envelope.
Should I buy the mesh or the solid version of the Mammoth bin?
Ask one question: should air, water, oil, dust and small pieces be allowed through the wall, or kept inside it? Mesh is right for parts that come out of a wash, parts carrying coolant, parts that need to dry, and anything where you want to see the level without lifting a lid. Solid is right for small or loose items that can escape, for fines and granules, for polished, plated or painted surfaces that must not touch an open grid, and for anything that must not drip onto the floor or onto stock below. Most plants end up buying both and colour-coding them by area.
How much weight should one person carry in a full Mammoth bin?
Treat the bin as a weight budget rather than a volume. The hand positions are around 820 mm apart, so the load sits well away from the body and a weight that feels manageable on a small bin feels very different here. As a working discipline, keep a bin that a single person will carry more than a few metres at or under about 15 kg, use two people or a trolley above that, and never let a Mammoth become a bin that has to be dragged. Set the number with your own safety officer, then mark the corresponding fill height in millimetres inside the bin so the operator does not have to judge it.
Can Mammoth bins be used for food products or in a cold store?
The range carries food-safe and recyclable marks and is moulded in polypropylene copolymer with resin code 05, so food contact use is within the intended scope, subject to your own product, cleaning and regulatory checks. The limit to watch is temperature: the stated service range is -10 C to +70 C. Chilled rooms and normal ambient storage sit comfortably inside that window, but a frozen store running at -18 C or lower is outside it, and so is a hot wash tank above 70 C. If you are storing food, choose the solid version and write a cleaning method that stays under the temperature limit.
Will small fasteners and washers fall through a mesh Mammoth bin?
Small hardware is exactly the case where mesh causes trouble, and it is also the case where the Mammoth is usually the wrong bin anyway. Loose steel fasteners run at roughly 4 to 4.5 kg per litre, so a 15 kg budget is used up in about 20 mm of fill height in a 290 mm deep bin, which is a waste of a large bin. Before you assume any given item is safe in mesh, ask us for the aperture on the current moulding and test with the smallest and thinnest piece in the family, including washers, clips and off-cuts. For loose small components the Bull Bin and shelf bin ranges are the sensible answer.
How many Mammoth bins fit on a pallet or in a rack bay?
The 820 x 315 mm footprint is not pallet-modular, which surprises people. On a 1200 x 1000 mm pallet you get three bins per layer with an unusable strip left over, and on a 1200 x 800 mm pallet you get two. In racking the arithmetic is much better: standing the bins with the 820 mm length running into the depth of the rack, a 2700 mm clear beam takes seven bins with comfortable hand clearance, or eight if you are willing to work with narrow gaps. Seven bins per level is about 375 litres of storage on one shelf, and the level needs full decking rather than two bare beams.
Can I wash Mammoth bins with steam or in a hot wash tank?
Keep every cleaning step below the +70 C service limit. Warm water with a mild alkaline detergent, a soft brush and a rinse handles almost everything a factory bin picks up. A steam lance held close to the wall can push the surface past the limit locally and leave a permanent bow or dent in the panel, and a hot tank running at 80 to 85 C will distort a batch of bins in one cycle. Avoid solvents, thinners and brake cleaner, which can craze the surface. Dry inverted; the mesh version drains and dries far faster than the solid one, which matters in a Mumbai or Kolkata monsoon.
When is a pallet a better choice than a Mammoth bin?
Use a pallet when the part is longer than about 730 mm, when the unit or the aggregate weight goes past what a person or a hand trolley should move, when the SKU turns over more than a bin or two per shift, when material arrives palletised from the supplier and re-decanting adds nothing, and when access is forklift-only. Use bins when quantities are partial, when picking is by hand, when parts move between cells in small lots, when you need lot separation and honest FIFO, and when crush damage from stacking is a real risk. Mixed fleets are normal; the mistake is applying one answer everywhere.
Do you supply stands and trolleys, and can you deliver outside Mumbai?
Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has been an authorised stockist of the Alkon range for over thirty years and stocks the accessories list, which covers partitions, louvre panels, stands, trolleys, rails, a universal rail and crash carts. Confirm with us which of these are dimensioned for the 820 x 315 mm Mammoth footprint before you design a layout around them. We are at Shop-1, Gagangiri Chs, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai 400703, open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 19:00, on 93266 29967 or 98201 01937 and at enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com, and we despatch to plants across India.
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