Now that the holidays have come and gone, did Santa bring you good loot? As a converter, your wish list surely included equipment or accessories to make your job easier and more efficient. In the area of winding and rewinding, you might have asked for better chucks/shafts, winding machines, web guiding and tension control. Before acquiring equipment, however, two questions may be on your mind: What's hot? What is the future of the technology?

Lightweight yet rugged—converters want both qualities in their chucks and shafts. Air shafts, for example, are usually handled by plant personnel who carry and load them into roll cores several times during a shift. Heavy steel shafts are not only cumbersome but increase the risk of on-the-job injury. A popular alternative is carbon fiber, which reportedly exceeds the strength of steel, and is lighter than aluminum.

Shortcomings of carbon fiber, which may be alleviated in the future, include higher cost and lower resistance to shock loads, according to Jeff Damour, sales manager, Converter Accessory Corp., Wind Gap, Pa. Carbon-fiber shafts' lower resistance to repeated shock loads, such as dropping them, will decrease the overall life of these air shafts, Damour contends.

The need for speed triggers the need for better control. However, the process can be hindered with an ineffective and outdated shaft arrangement and brake/clutch system. Installing safety chucks, says Kevin Gendreau, sales manager for Gorham, Maine-based Montalvo, is an answer. Customers can improve the performance of their machines to reach speeds as high as 3,000 fpm. Safety chucks also include a shaft extension for mounting a brake or clutch, or a pulley arrangement in a driven application.

As converters demand more performance from chucks and shafts, they test the limits of roll weights, especially with small core sizes. Mark Fortin, president, Double E Co., Inc., Bridgewater, Mass., notices among his customers a wider range of core sizes being used and the need to change sizes quickly. Because of the increasingly demanding torque and weight requirements, he believes that precision machining, advanced metallurgy and carefully controlled heat treatment of chuck components are more important than ever in providing good performance and durability.

Despite varied opinions about chucks and shafts, most suppliers and converters agree that proper sizing and specifying of these components for a particular application is most important. Speeds, materials, weights and other factors must be taken into consideration to ensure not only an efficient winding operation but a safe one as well.

As more companies enter the tension-control manufacturing biz, equipment prices continue diving. This is good news for converters who want more sophisticated tension control. As their customers ask for shorter runs and various types of output, such as different paper thicknesses, converters must ask for more flexible tension-control technology. According to Mark Breen, marketing manager for tension-control supplier Dover Flexo Electronics, Inc., Rochester, N.H., "Now that converters are becoming more versatile to meet their customer's needs, they're asking more of us."

Some converters will run materials as light as film to others as heavy as paperboard, all on the same machine, and as fast as possible. "Converters don't want to buy new equipment to handle the wider range," Breen says. "They expect the performance and range to be built into one piece of equipment. They're not only running a broader range of materials, but they're running them at much higher speeds. We have to provide the electronics and software to take the signals from the sensors in the transducers and tune the output to be very accurate. That's more difficult to do the faster you run the material through the press, because there's more variation in the tension."

To keep up with shorter and speedier converting runs—which require frequent starts, stops and material changeovers—equipment suppliers are advancing to digital control. However, Breen believes that both analog and digital are here to stay. More demanding, higher-end applications will often require digital technology, while lower-end products will typically opt for less expensive analog. This will be the case until digital equipment reaches analog prices—something no one foresees yet.

To accomplish better accuracy, easier set-up and less maintenance with web guiding, customers are buying either new lines with electro-mechanical systems or are retrofitting older, hydraulic web-guide systems with new digital-controlled, electro-mechanical components. Raymond Buisker, president, Accuweb, Inc., Madison, Wis., says that customers also request ultrasonic edge detectors that can compensate for environmental conditions, such as dust, humidity, air turbulence and temperature. The detector senses all materials from thin films to metals to textiles.

According to Scott Armstrong, sales manager, North American Mfg. Co., Inc., Cleveland, converters have traditionally used a lateral shifting unwind/rewind to correct web position. The trend today is to use an electro-mechanical guiding device after the unwind, replacing the shifting unwind and rewind themselves. This is said to improve accuracy and is relatively simple to incorporate.

Don Ross, vice president, Erhardt & Leimer, Inc., Spartanburg, S.C., sees the future of web guiding veering in two directions: "One converting segment will require that web guides be part of a machine process-control system, communicating via ControlNet, DeviceNet, EtherNet, etc. The other segment of the web-guiding market will require a simple, low-cost, stand-alone web guide that provides only basic functions."

Even without a crystal ball, experts at Tidland Corp. (Camas, Wash.), Aztech Machinery (Scottsdale, Ariz.), Independent Machine Co. (Fairfield, N.J.) and New Era Converting Machinery (Hawthorne, N.J.) predict that winding machines will continue handling larger rolls and smaller cores, while running a wider range of materials at higher speeds. In addition, loading and unloading will become faster and easier to increase production.

According to Tidland's R&D director Bill Miller, the converting industry will reap benefits from new technologies introduced by the automotive and aerospace industries. Embedded technologies, such as microprocessors and microchips, will eventually affect three areas: the identification and design specs for product information; automated roll handling; and the collection of data and evaluation of performance for predictive maintenance.

Converters are constantly facing new challenges, from tighter tolerances to higher speeds to shorter leadtimes. Shifting to just-in-time processes, while simultaneously cutting workforces is common. As a result, converters expect more from their equipment and want suppliers to step up to the challenge.

"The most significant challenge we've seen in the industry is the increasing productivity demands on converters. As speed of machines increase, the demand for higher performance converting machinery and roll products also increase," comments Paul Schulz, president, Webex, Inc., Neenah, Wis. Customers approach Schulz on issues such as tighter tolerances, higher speeds and reduced weights. "As the drive to provide 'more with less' continues, we expect the need for tight tolerance, low inertia, high-performance roll products to increase."