One Goal: Hotter Soccer" is the motto the Detroit Rockers live by. This National Professional Soccer League attracts its Michigan fans with exciting moves and an award-winning attitude, capturing an NPSL championship trophy in 1992.

While fans pack the arena to watch hot soccer, the team's employees are working diligently behind-the-scenes. Kathy Coyne, the Rockers' director of operations in Plymouth, Mich., searched for a cost-effective advertising medium to keep business booming. She chose a product called Translight? by Precision Coatings, Inc., a Walled Lake, Mich.-based specialty coater, compounder, roll/sheet converter and paper/plastic film laminator. Their one-way see-through film is an adjustable sign for businesses to mount on storefronts. From the outside, the advertised message is displayed and from the inside, a tinted see-through perspective is given.

"We looked at different materials that could be put up and taken down, because we share the arena with a hockey team," Coyne says. "We like the light shining through the product and being able to see through it."

So, how'd they convert that? After buying 4-mil., 37.5-in. wide polyester base film from DuPont® in Hopewell, Va., Precision Coatings pretreats both sides of the white, opaque film at 60 fpm to improve adhesion, using a 57-in. wide line by Sensitisers Group in England.

Next, an inkjet-receptive topcoat and a black "repositionable" adhesive are applied, while laminating a 92-gauge liner in tandem with the adhesive. The company formulates its own adhesive and designed the coater/laminator in-house. With dual coating heads and an inline laminating station, the machine runs the inkjet topcoat at 15 fpm and the black adhesive with lamination at 30 fpm.

Ten percent of the film's surface area is blown away with a LaserSharp® perforation system manufactured by LasX Industries, White Bear Lake, Wis. Processing the coated film at 4 fpm, the system requires no die maintenance or start/stop cleaning.

After perforation, the product is sized down to 36-in. by 50-ft. rolls with a Voorwood machine at 100 fpm. At 7-mil., the film is wound with interleaf paper and sold to distribution channels. For some customers, including the Detroit Rockers, PCI also prints with pigmented inks using a four-color HP 2500 wide-format inkjet printer. The Rockers graphic is 150 dpi.

According to Amit Roy, PCI's marketing manager, the company considered several perforation techniques before settling on laser perforation, picked for its speed, quality and accuracy. He comments, "When you look at the product even from 2 ft., you wouldn't know it's perforated. We did a lot of controlled experimentation to develop the final [laser] pattern."

More information from:

DuPont Films, 800/635-4639, fax: 804/530-4867, www.dupont.teijinfilms.com

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LasX Industries, Inc., 651/407-0011, fax: 651/407-0110, www.lasxindustries.com

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Sensitisers Group, 0326/373-623, fax: 0326/373-846

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Voorwood, 800/225-3879, fax: 530/365-3315, www.voorwood.com

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