Slitter Man

Recently I sold a small used slitter to a company with a very simple product process - they buy in big rolls of material and then use a slitter to cut to length.  Unlike most of the cutting machines we sell this customer didn't need a machine that could slit rolls of material down into narrower rolls; all they needed to do was to load a master / parent roll and cut it to length. The used slitter I sold them was ideal for the job - they loaded a large jumbo / parent roll and the operator entered details of the length of the roll he wanted to wind and pressed the 'go' button.  The machine would smoothly ramp up to speed and then slow down in time to stop at length.  This process shows a converting machine being used at its most basic, and it's certainly an effective way of selling rolls of material that sold has having an exact length. Every machine we design and build at Universal has a very accurate cut to length facility - on our larger machines most customers wind

Let's get back to basics - what is slitting?  Slitting is essentially cutting, but has come to be assumed to mean cutting in a certain way.  Whereas use of the word 'cutting' might denote a cut being made in a material or object using a saw, a sharp blade or another method 'slitting' has come to mean to cutting using a blade.  I'm saying this based on my own experience of working in the slitting / converting industry, so naturally my perspective isn't exactly objective.  In fact it's difficult for me to answer the question 'what is slitting' without considering that (to me at least) the very word 'slitting' has become onomatopoeia! But what does it mean? If I was pushed to condense the meaning of 'slitting' into a single sentence (which I guess is the very point of this blog post) then I would have to say: "Slitting is the process of making a slit (cut)." As intimated above, to me slitting in the process of loading