Low cost slitter love

'Low Cost Slitter' is a phrase I thought long and hard about when writing some marketing copy for our Universal X1 slitter - we're trying to get across the fact that we have partly designed this slitter to be a minimal capital investment, but we also need to make sure potential customers know that this is a solidly built and cleverly designed device. Before I go any further let's have a quote:

"There is hardly anything in the world today that some man cannot make just a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who buy on price alone are this man’s awful prey." - John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

This quote perfectly summarises why I put so much thought into how to describe our recently redesigned X1 slitter rewinder; here is a machine that has a price tag that won't look too painful on an invoice, but it is by no means a budget machine.

Introducing the Universal X1 Low Cost Slitter

Our 'low cost slitter' wasn't designed in answer to the very poorly built slitters that currently foul the market, neither was it built to enable us to fight our way into the crowded lower end of the slitter world. The Universal X1 is designed to perform a specific role for a particular part of the market, it isn't available with as many options or automations as some of its bigger brothers and sisters, but it doesn't need them.

We launched the Universal X1 as a highly productive slitter that can be installed where space is restricted, which makes it ideal for:

Clean room environments
Expanding slitting lines
Adding slitting and winding capabilities to print facilities
Product development trials
Products requiring an extremely short web path
Thick materials
And much more!

This British designed and manufactured low-cost slitter shares many common control (and mechanical) components with the slitter machines at the other end of our range (like the X9 SR Slitter); just one of the reasons that the X1 is such exceptional value for money.

So have we designed a low cost slitter? Yes! Have we built a cheap slitter? No, we most certainly have not!

Find out more about the Universal X1 Slitter Rewinder...

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Trim removal on slitters

A trim fan attached to a slitter. As discussed previously on this blog the process of slitting (at its most basic) can be reduced to the one-line description of ' a big roll is loaded on one side of the slitter rewinder, and smaller rolls are loaded off the other side' and that's fine... most of the time. Here comes the example! If a 1000mm wide roll is loaded onto a rewinder and is slit down into rolls that are 212mm wide then four rolls would be produced. If your mental maths is up to scratch you might have noticed that 4x212 does not equal 1000, and that means that from the original / master / jumbo roll there will be roughly 117mm left over. Sometimes this happens because the edges of jumbo rolls are discarded due to damage, print reasons or simply because the material being slit isn't coated all the way to the edges of the roll. So what happens to this waste material? Waste material can be wound onto cores in the same way 'correct' rolls are,

Slitter core alignment using lasers

Lasers and slitters go together like cheese and biscuits, and fitting laser scoring, cutting and perforation devices to slitter rewinders is something that has now become reasonably commonplace here in our factory, but lasers can do a lot more than cut and perforate. We've recently had a huge upsurge in interest in our ' ComputaCore ' laser core alignment system, and because it is such a simple system to control and operate it can be a little bit challenging finding many things to write about it - it's simple and it works very well! But what's in the box? We've made our laser core alignment kit as easy to fit as it is to operate, and to highlight the simplicity of this approach to perfect core alignment we've recently published a post on the subject on our blog here - https://www.universalconvertingequipment.com/laser-core-alignment-whats-in-the-kit-and-how-does-it-work We're planning a new promotional video for our laser core alignment syste

Skymark are using laser to stay head of the competition

The news has just gone public that Skymark Packaging Ltd have bought a Universal X6lp Laser perforation Slitter Rewinder for their facility in Scunthorpe, here in the UK. Skymark have recently been in the news for declaring that their experience of the flexible packaging market is particularly buoyant at the moment. Their reasoning is that following the Brexit vote, a lot of supply chain risk is being mitigated by companies processing more materials here in the UK. In addition to sharing common features with our X6 slitter, the X6lp can also laser perforate and produce easy open scribe lines. The easy open packaging systems are popular with producers who want their products to be consumer-friendly, but to still be able to protect the contents of the packaging.

Slitter Man

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