Web guiding - an introduction.

Web guiding is a term describing the method used to correct badly wound rolls or material and is used on slitters and salvage winders.

A sensor looks at material (web) running through a machine and sends a signal to a device that moves parts of the machine to correct the badly wound roll. Putting it at its most basic web guiding systems allow you to load a roll with a bad edge profile (I.E. not flat) onto a machine rewind it so that it has a flat edge profile.

Guider eyes (sensors) read the edge of the web, a line on the web or a 'broken' line printed on a roll of material. If the web guiding system 'sees' the web move left it will move the web to the right so that as it winds up on the rewind end of the slitter / doctor machine the edge of the final roll will be flat.

Many older web guiders move the winding web using hydraulic or pneumatic (air) methods, but hydraulics can leak oil onto the web and pneumatics tend to have slow response times unsuitable to fast moving webs. At Universal Converting Equipment our web guiders are all electric, thereby are cleaner, faster and much more energy efficient than older systems that use hydraulics.

Roll with bad edge profile, note the 'steps'

Roll with a good edge profile

Add web guiding to your machine...

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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,

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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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