Skip to main content

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...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Winding onto 6" cores on a slitter with 3" shafts

A (used) 6" differential ball chuck designed to fit a 60mm rewind shaft (once the 3" chucks have been removed!) I sometimes use this personal blog of mine to talk about the basics of slitting and rewinding, with the content partly led by thinking back to the questions I had when I first started working in the converting machinery industry.  One of the first questions I had was 'how on earth can slitter rewinders with 3" rewind shafts be used for winding onto 6" cores?' A lot of converters and labellers / packaging companies regularly switch between winding onto 3" (76mm) and 6" (152mm) cores, which is one of the reasons we designed our Automatic Core Cutter to change between core sizes in under thirty seconds.  But what do companies who predominantly wind onto 3" cores do when they need to wind onto 6" cores?  The answer is actually quite simple - they remove the 3" ball chucks and slide on 6" core chucks!  There are of...

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, ...

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.