ICE Europe 2015 - our week in Munich

The Universal X6 Duplex Slitter Rewinder.

ICE Europe was great again this year The Slitter, Automatic Core Cutter, Hot Melt Coating Station and Roll Handling Trolley we took are all back in our factory (only briefly; we sold them).

ICE Europe is something of a highlight in our calendar, and with good reason. Organising our presence at this exhibition takes a great deal of planning and careful thought, but this year (yet again) the logistical side of the event went very smoothly indeed. ICE is a great opportunity not only to meet new customers, but also to mix with some of the people we only usually communicate with by phone and email (like journalists).

The main focus of our stand was a Universal X6 Slitter. We displayed (and ran) the most popular variant of this machine, which was set up for flexible packaging slitting. The automation and tension control features of the X6 proved extremely popular with the crowds of delegates who flooded our stand. There were nine of us working on the stand this year, all of whom were kept very busy with enquiries.

Our official ICE Europe 2015 review can be found on our website at https://www.universalconvertingequipment.com/go/ice-europe-2015-review

Comments

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...

Slitter Man

Search This Blog