Pimp My Gluer

There’s nothing like a TV makeover show to make your weathered house, spouse or auto look great again. All you have to do is let the likes of the folks from ‘Pimp My Ride’ loose on your 1984 Caddy Eldorado and suddenly you’ve got a turbo charged monster, complete with in car X-box, satellite TV, an Internet connection and a candy-apple paint job. Not only does it go faster, but it’s got so much functionality that you may never need to go back into the house.

Now, I’m not suggesting you spray paint your folder-gluer and fit a microwave oven so that your operators don’t need to stop for lunch. However, there is a range of add-ons available for most folder-gluer lines that improve efficiency, increase productivity and have the potential to open valuable new markets.

The Need for Speed

Let’s look first at those cornerstones of manufacturing—efficiency and productivity. Making the most of what you already have starts with ensuring that your line is well maintained, and your team well trained. Still, even in tip-top condition with a motivated and skilled crew, production lines can be held back by humans. For example, most modern straight-line folder-gluers can easily outpace the humans feeding blanks into them or boxing up the cartons they produce. Invariably, shouts to slow down from either end of the line are usually heeded by the operator.

Adding an automatic carton packer not only means that line speed can be increased, but their use can also free-up staff for other tasks. The latest generation of carton packers use laser counting devices to ensure that exactly the right number of cartons are packed in each box. They can also pick out and timestamp sample cartons for QA audit purposes.

At the front end of the gluer, the job of keeping the feeder loaded is more important than it might at first seem. Maintaining an optimum height of blanks in the feed is key to making sure each blank leaves the feed on time, and in the exact same orientation, to ensure folding consistency. Using an automatic feeder ensures this consistency of height. Combine that with a batch inverter and the crew member at the feed can keep up with even the fastest lines and reduce the risk of work related health problems such as repetitive strain injury.

Until recently, getting this same packing efficiency when running crash-lock cartons wasn’t particularly necessary—or easy. Few crash-locks ran at high speeds and the geometry of the folded crash-lock carton makes it tricky for an automatic machine to pack easily. However, earlier this year a completely new type of in-line crash-lock unit was introduced that can almost double the performance of folder-gluers. To gain the most efficiency from this productivity increase, made possible by the elimination of mechanical hooks, users need to have access to high performance packing for crash-locks. The latest in automatic packers has addressed this issue. Now, with the new high speed crash-lock units and specialized crash-lock packers, users can significantly improve the efficiency of their crash-lock work.

Those printers working with varnished board, synthetic substrates or metallized board may think they have drawn the short straw when it comes to having materials that fold and glue easily. These substrates tend to have low surface tension and, therefore, do not glue easily. They also have a tendency to mark, particularly during the feeding process. A handy new pre-feeder uses a new approach to an old process. By using pick and place technology the likelihood of marking during feeding is virtually eliminated. Units such as this also improve the feeding of metallized, hot-foil stamped or paper products and those with apertures.

Later down the line, plasma treatment of the carton, just before it’s glued, raises the surface tension of the glue target area. This enhances cohesion and removes the need for varnish cut outs on UV products.

Driving Market Change