Slitters save money (and energy)!

If you look in the new issue of Package Print Worldwide (@PackPrintWorld) you'll spot a photo of our rather handsome X3 Slitter Rewinder on page 18, the reason this slice of cool blue is on page 18 is because it is a good example of one of our energy (and money) saving slitters. A large part of my job at Universal Converting Equipment involves working on press releases and talking to editors and journalists, and while this bit of coverage is one of many I thought I'd mention it here on my own blog because energy efficiency is a topic we've been talking about a lot recently.

Reducing energy usage has long been a hot topic in our factory (and equally importantly in our design suite), and over the last few months we've started to let the world know what our machines can do to reduce energy consumption. I'm particularly proud of this aspect of our machinery as reducing energy consumption is something of a personal mission of mine (I even cycle to work!), so I thought I'd use my personal blog (this one) to give you a list of some of the press releases and official blog posts we've recently published on the topic:

We're planning some more articles and press releases on energy efficiency, so watch this space!

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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 fixes, I love days like this!

Slitter downtime is something everyone wants to avoid - when a machine isn't running it isn't being productive, and therefore it isn't making money. Ensuring that slitter rewinders (and of course, all other converting machinery) run at peak efficiency is a two-way street, and one of the many things that makes me proud to work at Universal Converting Equipment is our ability to respond to customers' service needs fast, really fast. Late yesterday afternoon we took a call from the production manager at a UK facility who was tearing his hair out due to the failure of a third party machine. We immediately dispatched an engineer, and even although the failed machine wasn't one that we had built our expert was able to get the machine back up and running in well under an hour. This speed of response is by no means unusual for us, but the reason I wanted to mention it here on my blog is that I was fortunate enough to be the person who took the call from the very el

Slitter words mean what now?

Slitting / cutting machines are complex beasts, and so I guess it is perfectly natural that a complex vocabulary is spawned by discussing the methods and mechanics of slitting. The corporate culture within companies that use converting machinery usually ensures that slitter operators and their management all speak the same language, but when a need arises for slitter users to speak to outside agencies (when buying or servicing machinery) then it can become a bit of a challenge making oneself understood. Introducing the Slitter Glossary. When new customers contact me about buying a new slitter (or upgrading / servicing an third-party machine) it is important to make sure I fully understand our customers' needs. I concentrate a large portion of my energies making the specification part of the buying process incredibly simple for our customers, and recently a part of that process has involved creating a glossary of slitter terms . The slitter glossary is a bit like a garden or

Slitter Man

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