The birth of the Future of Slitting

We have started using the phrase ‘the future of slitting’ in some of our promotional material, and with the recent technical advances we have made with the X6 I think this is a fair boast. I can clearly remember the start of the development process of the Universal X6.

The concept for the X6 wasn’t just revolutionary at a mechanical and controls level. It was startlingly logical from a practical perspective. I’m sales and marketing person, not an engineer. I have never had a job as a machine operator. Yet I can walk up to a X6 and run a slitting job through it without any problems at all. The X6 is ‘plug and play’.

The Universal X6 was developed from the same starting point as all Universal machines. The priorities being productivity, ease of use and reliability. For as long as I have worked with Universal there has been an obsessive attitude to customer support.

As the X6 developed from concept to product the ability to further improve support was woven into the very fabric of the machine. Extensive on-screen diagnostics and remote management are understandably popular with customers and machine operators alike. Before long Universal made public something that our customers have known for years - Universal offer free lifetime support on every X6 sold.

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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, ...

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.

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...

Slitter Man

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