Converters cut to the future with new slitter/rewinders

In CONVERTING Magazine's first exclusive Slitter/Rewinder Technology Supplement, converters tell how they've stepped up their capabilities, quickened turnarounds and become more efficient by installing the latest slitter/rewinders.

By Stephanie Duschene, Senior Editor and Pauline Covell, European Editor -- Converting Magazine, 9/1/1998

From a purely equipment standpoint, Rock J. LaManna, owner of Minneapolis/St. Paul-based contract converter and packager Advanced Converting Technologies, believes its niche in the marketplace is having "the very latest, state-of-the-art technology." Offering "one-stop solutions," Advanced Converting can produce everything from jumbo slit rolls to finished goods.

"We took advantage of investigating and selecting all new, state-of-the-art equipment," says La-Manna. "We chose slitter/rewinders with advanced engineering and design from Incotek and Stanford."

Advanced Converting boasts $2 million in annual sales as it embarks on its second full year as a contract slitter/rewinder for the Twin Cities area. Admittedly, new equipment isn't Advanced Converting's only asset.

Advanced Converting fills a regional void, a primary reason why its customers, such as 3M, Imation and Dyneon, look to Advanced Converting for fast turnarounds of slit and rewound material as well as preflighting new materials. The company's one-stop shopping focus ‚ slitting/rewinding, sheeting, laminating, diecutting, packaging and fulfillment services ‚ offers its approximately 150 customers quick, full-service solutions.

Advanced Converting's start in the more "high-tech" converting of films, foils and plastic, rather than the more commodity-type papers and label stocks, has helped the company get its foot in the door with customers. Many of these same customers have consolidated vendors and are purchasing additional services from Advanced Converting, such as slitting of paper, label stock and silicone release liners.

"Most contract converters equipped for label stock and paper have limited equipment to convert lightweight films and foils," says LaManna. He contends that's not the case at Advanced Converting, home to slitting/rewinding equipment with precise tension control.

Advanced Converting's 30-in.-wide, custom-designed Stanford Model 638 is dedicated to narrow web slitting/rewinding and a 64-in.-wide Incotek model WFZ60.160 tackles the wider jobs. Both can run at up to 1,600 fpm. The Incotek unit can slit down to 1 in. wide while the Stanford slits to 1/4 in.

Advanced Converting can handle a range of material gauges, from 0.0005 in. to 0.25 in. Its Incotek slitter/rewinder can accept rolls up to 50-in. outer diameter (OD). A center-wind unit, the Incotek slitter has interchangeable tooling for both shear and razor slitting, Advanced Converting also specified a shaftless unwind with cantilevered rewind shafts for ergonomic reasons, quick setups and flexibility. In addition, Advanced Converting specified multi-unwind attachments to accommodate different core and drum sizes, allowing materials to be converted straight from customer rolls. With an eye toward its next purchase, Advanced Converting is now evaluating wider and faster slitting/rewinding equipment.

Fast, flexible and reliable

With 2,000 different hot-stamp products and 6,000 customers in 50 countries, Crown Roll Leaf, Inc., Paterson, N.J., counts on its slitting and rewinding equipment to consistently meet demand. Among its fleet of 20 slitter/rewinders and several (circular) cutters, a new 60-in.-wide Cevenini EDS 6 center-wind machine installed last spring and an upgraded 60-in.-wide, 12-position traverse slitter/rewinder from Independent Machine are the flagships.

"With the Cevenini, there's a batching feature that allows us to cut multiple sizes on a 24- or 50-in. roll," says plant manager George Waitts. It also enables extremely tight tolerances down to 1/32-in. increments.

Late last year, Crown Roll Leaf added six additional traverse winding stations to its Independent Machine traverse slitter/rewinder. By doing so, it doubled the amount of finished material it could produce, up to 60,000 ft of foil in one slit roll.

Crown Roll Leaf will likely buy another wider slitter/rewinder later this year as a companion to a new 56-in.-wide Cerutti flexo press on order. "We're also thinking about buying another traverse slitter/rewinder if we decide to expand this product line. If the demand for traverse winding increase in both our pigment products and holographic security products line," says Waitts. "We haven't decided on manufacturers for either piece of equipment, but over the years we've found both Cevenini and Independent Machine to produce equipment that's easy to use, solid, reliable and reasonably priced."

Crown Roll Leaf, one of the world's largest manufacturers of hot-stamping foils and a worldwide supplier of holograms and holographic products, has complete in-house imaging, mastering, embossing, slitting and printing capabilities. It converts a variety of materials (primarily polyester) on its slitter/rewinders in a range of gauges (from 1/2 mil to 4 mil).

All of its slitter/rewinders were engineered to handle the variations, says Waitts. It is critical that slitter/rewinders for holographic materials maintain precise registration. "Through different photo eyes and other sensors we can pick up eye marks and slit down very precisely, to as narrow as 1/8 in.," says Waitts.

In-house resources bolster bottom line

While New York Label & Box, Islandia, N.Y., has been in business for 114 years, it only recently made the decision to slit its label and folding carton stock in-house. By doing so, the flexo printer has cut inventory costs in half (from $400,000 to $200,000) and freed space and cash flow to add new presses and printing capabilities.

"There are also turnaround advantages," says Chris Freddo, vice president. "We keep 30-in. rolls on hand so that when we get a job, we can slit it down immediately to the job specs and not have to wait for the stock to be delivered ‚ which can be anywhere from on to six days."

Its 30-in.-wide Cyco slitter from Flexo Export Ltd. runs eight hours a day at speeds from 300 to 400 fpm. New York Label outputs about 50,000 ft of slit material a day. An economical buy at about $30,000 new, six years ago, the Cyco slitter offers both razor and shear-cutting methods and can slit a range of material types and thickness', from 2-mil Mylarw to 4-mil vinyl.

When shopping around to find the right slitter within budget, Freddo says, he shied away from ex-tremely high-tech equipment in favor of the Cyco slitter, which is "simple and basic, and does an ex-cellent job."

Pushing the flexibility envelope

Custom contract converter Saturn Services, Romeoville, Ill., installed a new 62-in.-wide Dusenbery 835 slitter/rewinder in May that Peter Jaroze, general manager, says, "even scared the people at Dusenbery."

"We worked with Dusenbery to push the envelope to do as many different things on that machine to maximize our flexibility," he says. "We wanted to handle a wide range of materials, thickness' and varying rewinds."

The result was a versatile slitter/rewinder capable of running at 1,400 fpm. It has both razor and shear-cut tooling and multiple rewind methods: air differential, slip differential and air shaft. All of this was designed and delivered in 16 weeks, says Jaroze.

"These were all equipment capabilities that Dusenbery had, just not all on the same machine," says Jaroze. "They had to do some reconfiguring to give us everything we wanted." The slitter/rewinder has recipe storage capability that logs job specs such as rewind pressures, tension and brake unwind data for repeat jobs.

QS 9000- and ISO 9002-certified, Saturn Services began its business in 1991. It currently has seven slitter/rewinders, mostly 60-in.-wide Dusenbery machines, and a few custom-built proprietary slitter/rewinders for narrow web orders. It can slit rolls of materials (films, papers, laminates, plastics, printed materials and nonwovens) from 1/2 mil to 0.045 mil in. thick, down to 1/8 in. wide. Turnarounds are getting quicker, says Jaroze, sometimes just a few hours.

Not far into the future Saturn Services expects to add two new Dusenbery slitter/rewinders. The new slitter/rewinders will likely be specified to handle thicker gauge material. Saturn Services also has a 24-in.-wide Stanford doctor winder that it uses for inspection and trimming.

Slitting complements sheeting

Progressive Converting, Inc. (Pro-Con), with plants in Appleton, Wis., Hazleton, Pa., and a new startup in Sparks, Nev., focuses primarily on contract paper sheeting. But that doesn't diminish the importance or value of its Jagenberg Con Wind I and II slitter/rewinders.

"The slitting and rewinding is a natural offshoot of our core sheeting business," says owner Mark Reinhart. "We do a lot of rewinding that services our sheeters, such as taking 3 or 4 in. of edge trim off each side of a roll to make it run more efficiently on the sheeters."

This alone keeps Pro-Con slitting and rewinding on a regular basis. And with in-house slit-ting/rewinding equipment, Pro-Con can sell both rolls and sheets.

Exclusively running paper, Pro-Con projects to convert approximately 200 million lbs of stock this year (mostly coated one-side and coated two-side sheets, but occasionally tissues and newsprint). Pro-Con currently slits a range of papers from heavy 24-pt board to light, 25-lb kraft paper, down to 4 in. wide.

Both Con Winds are 90-in. wide and run at up to 4,000 fpm. They feature two-drum rewinders and shear-cut tooling. Jagenberg has recently upgraded the brakes on a Con Wind I unit in Appleton to handle larger rolls. Another Con Wind II is expected to be installed soon in the new Nevada plant.

A plethora of formats from Spain

Long-established Spanish converter of hot-stamping foils and textile label stock, Comercial ArquÈ entered the booming thermal transfer ribbon (TTR) market just over a year ago. But after only four months, company managers realized that far more capacity in the slitting and rewinding operation was needed.

The Barcelona-based converter took delivery of a Dusenbery Europe 636 TTR machine at the end of last year. "From nothing a year ago, we're now converting some half a million square meters of TTR a month," says marketing director Damiý ArquÈ.

Comercial ArquÈ buys jumbo rolls of the heat-sensitive, coated polyester film from all over the world and converts the thin, difficult-to-handle material into the plethora of formats needed for the wide range of thermal transfer printers on the market. "There are thousands of different specifications: different cores, labels, customized packaging, different colored leaders, notches, and widths," ArquÈ explains.

"There are several different types of coated polyester, too ‚ wax-coated for paper printing, resin-coated for plastics and labels, near-edge for the Tecw printer and textile for uneven surfaces. We have to be flexible to adapt the tension and the guiding of the edge of the jumbo rolls.

"But TTR is a logical migration for our business. With our converting experience in hot-foil stamping materials, it's not that complicated."

ArquÈ's Dusenbery 636 TTR machine handles web widths up to 1,000 mm and can run at up to 450 m/min, although the speed is not the important factor. "The most important thing is to produce rolls of good quality," ArquÈ says. "Appearance is critical in this market. Secondly, machine productivity is important. Changeover takes 20 to 30 minutes.

"Quite simply, we believe this machine is the best in the field. We already knew it was widely used by others in TTR. The quality of the rewind is excellent; we're achieving CD-like surface quality across the rolls."

Incorporated in the 636's rewind section are horizontal layon rolls mounted on linear bearings that provide controlled pressure against the winding package. This permits layon pressure with the rewind mandrel running in either direction. As the materials are by nature very slippery, this arrangement prevents the winding-in of air.

"The layon roll is critical, as is the automatic tension control system. All contribute to the quality of the rewind," he adds.

In the rewind tension control, load cells compare the actual tension with the theoretical level predicted by the programmer. The level of rewind torque is automatically adjusted to give the desired tension. Rewinding is by locked core held in place by air-expanding shafts. The double turret system reportedly minimizes downtime on changeover and is said to ensure good initial core-to-web alignment.

An integral cantilevered, braked unwind stand is designed for easy loading of the jumbo rolls. A major feature is the angled splice table between the unwind stand and the slitting section. Motorized feed rollers help the operator to rapidly and accurately place the leader panel. The oscillating trim rewind is also geared to productivity.

For the future, ArquÈ is looking at fax ribbons. "This is already exploding in Japan, and I see Spain will be an important market next year. It does require the ability to include end-of-roll warning marks on the TTR. And on-line packaging applications will be huge in Spain; I see TTR replacing inkjet and laser."