Slitter Man

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.

There’s always something interesting happening here at Universal.  Usually the most interesting activities I get involved with are customer trials or R&D.  Both are great because they are good opportunities to showcase the enthusiasm inherent in the culture at Universal. Sometimes some of the scenes that impress me the most are the quiet ones.  A box full of beautifully machines parts, ready for the assembly line.  Or the fascinating Solidworks schematics being worked on the studiously focussed atmosphere of the drawing office. A couple of days ago I walked through the part of the factory where our CCA Automatic Core Cutters are built.  All the mechanical fitters, electrical and controls engineers were elsewhere.  But on that day, in this quiet section of the factory was the perfect picture of efficiency and productivity - six automatic core cutters, ready for commissioning.  I took a photo on my phone and have decided to share it here, on my p...

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 ...

Since I started working with Universal, back in the mists of time, the number of machines leaving the factory in Ipswich has been increasing.  For the first few years the increase in the number of machines being packed up and shipped off to customers was raising at a healthily steady rate. In the last few years production has really ramped up. It’s a real pleasure to be in the factory when a machine is being shipped to a customer.  All the designers, production staff, machine fitters, electricians, machinists and everyone else also get a kick out of seeing a machine leave us for a new home. The space left by departing machines on the factory floor is never empty for more than what seems like a few minutes.  As soon as one machine is gone another build starts in its place.  I don’t think I’m at liberty to reveal how many slitting machines leave this factory each year, but something I can say for sure is that Universal are asserting their place as a world-leadin...

Drupa 2016 may seem like a distant memory to some people in this industry, but here at Universal the legacy of last year’s Drupa exhibition is still strongly felt.  We met many new people who are now customers, or who are in the process of becoming customers.  Exhibiting at Drupa also gave us the opportunity to spend some time showing existing customers some of our latest technical developments. Being a part of Drupa was a great opportunity to show off our X6 Slitter Rewinder.  With an estimated attendance of a third of a million people my colleagues who were on the exhibition stand had their work cut out for them.  Over the eleven days of the show we had an overwhelming amount of interest in the machinery we were exhibiting.  In addition to the X6 we also took a RT2 Roll Handling Trolley and a CCA Automatic Core Cutter to Dusseldorf with us. When potential customers ask when they can see the machinery running it’s great to be able to run it right there o...

When it comes to exhibitions we believe that it’s important to be able to show potential customers exactly what makes our machines popular.  For ICE Europe 2017 and ICE USA 2017 we exhibited the latest generation of our X6 Slitter Rewinder. For the duration of both shows our stands were exceptionally busy.  What attracted the visitors was our ability to show in a very hands-on way how we have developed the X6 to be fast, efficient and incredibly easy to operate.  We also showcased some of the latest developments that have made non-stop slitting a reality for our customers.  Having a fully operational machine on our stands proved very popular indeed. We received great feedback on our policy of offering free lifetime support on every Slitter Rewinder we sell.  This confirmed that both the profit potential of the machines we build, as well as the attentive support we offer is key to continuing to develop the long-term relationships we enjoy with our customers...

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...

The Universal X6 Laser-perforation and Inspection Slitter answers the requirement modern food-packaging companies have to perforate packaging films in-line. By perforating in-line huge savings can be made, both in time to process and in capital investment. Much like the Universal HMCS (Hot Melt Coating Station) this Laser-perforating slitter rewinder adheres to the fact that if you can have one machine to complete at least two tasks then energy requirements are lower, staffing / operator requirements are reduced and product can be processed much faster than if each materials were loaded and unloaded onto two separate bits of machinery. With the X6 Laser-perforation and Inspection Slitter we've taken this theory up a notch by also including a vision system. In food packing accuracy is everything - if perforations are slightly too large or too small the food-preservation qualities change dramatically. Food packagers demand perfection and proof of perfection. The Universal X6 ...

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...

As a part of our differential chuck range we have 9mm wide differential chucks that are suitable down to a slit width of 10mm.  The overall cost of differential shafts will rise slightly the smaller your minimum slit width.  The 9mm wide diff chucks aren't especially expensive, you just need more of them if you're slitting the full width of the shaft.  Some customers use a variety of chuck widths (and / or spacers) on their shafts then have the operators move the chucks around according to which job is being run, this takes time, so other customers load their entire shafts with narrower width chucks.  The logic being that the initial cost of the chucks is quickly mitigated by the saved labour and time costs.  Wide rolls will run on narrow differential chucks without any issue, whereas narrow slit rolls will not wind happily onto wide differential chucks. So is it worth investing in narrow differential chucks?  The answer is yes!

We have published a new video on the  Universal X2 Salvage Winder page on our website.  This is the first footage of our popular X2 Salvage Winder (A.K.A Doctor Rewinder ) that we have made publicly available. The X2 variant shown in the video was built to accommodate large roll diameters, and this is worth mentioning because the design of the X2 does change depending on the demands of the processes for which it will be used. Our X2 is designed to be versatile so trying to list all the processes it is capable of would be impossible, here is a list of some of the more common uses: Salvage winding Recycling waste product (by trimming) Correcting badly wound rolls (by web guiding) Defect removal (using splice table) Print inspection Winding to length Winding from one core size to another Correction tension on rolls Trimming Changing print orientation Click here to find out more about Universal X2 Salvage Winders...

Web guiding is a term describing the method used to correct badly wound rolls or material and is used on slitters and salvage winders .  A sensor looks at material (web) running through a machine and sends a signal to a device that moves parts of the machine to correct the badly wound roll.  Putting it at its most basic web guiding systems allow you to load a roll with a bad edge profile (I.E. not flat) onto a machine rewind it so that it has a flat edge profile. Guider eyes (sensors) read the edge of the web, a line on the web or a 'broken' line printed on a roll of material.  If the web guiding system 'sees' the web move left it will move the web to the right so that as it winds up on the rewind end of the slitter / doctor machine the edge of the final roll will be flat. Many older web guiders move the winding web using hydraulic or pneumatic (air) methods, but hydraulics can leak oil onto the web and pneumatics tend to have slow response times unsuitable to f...

Sometimes when cutting cores in a core cutter odd lengths are left over, they are too short to be useful so they are either discarded as waste or taped to other waste cores in an attempt to join several bits of scrap together to create a single usable core.  Taping several lengths of core together can create potentially dangerous problems that I won't go into, needless to say it's not a great idea! But I can see why companies wish to minimise scrap core waste, so here's a potentially better way of doing so: Save money and minimise core wastage without using tape to join together scrap bits of core Several of our customers buy in parent cores at multiple lengths and then use the most appropriate cores for each job.  We have designed our Core Cutter to accurately measure the parent core as it is loaded, the machine then works out how much trim to cut off meaning that each subsequent cut creates a usable core. One of our customers had an aggressively low target for reducin...

When you get right down to the gritty details of cardboard cores you'll find that no two core suppliers are quite the same, and when bought in bulk no two parent / master cores are quite the same length.  As your freshly purchased cores come off the transport and into your life you'll find the lengths in the batch are very similar, but they are infrequently all  exactly the same size. The variations in core lengths will often be very small, but when you're as focussed on minimising waste when cutting cores as you are focussed on cutting accurate core lengths then knowing exactly how long your parent cores are is crucial.  You could have your operator measure every core as it comes off the pallet, but that would be time consuming, and with the best will in the world it would probably also be inaccurate. Core cutter auto-trim Our CCA Automatic Core Cutters solves the problem of irregular sized parent cores by having a switch-able 'auto-trim' function. ...

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, ...

Closed Loop Tension Control  describes of the systems we use to accurately control the tension of materials running through slitting and winding machines ; the simplest description of the process that I can come up with for the purposes of this blog post is thus: When we utilise Closed Loop Tension Control on a machine load cell (sensors) are installed on key parts of the machine, these load cells measure the actual tension of the materials being wound as it passes through the machine.  The information fed back from the load cells is then used by the control system to make precise adjustments to the machine to attain perfect tension throughout the slitting or rewinding process. Now I'll be the first to admit that the above paragraph is hardly a snappy explanation of a process that is essential to controlling substrate tension, so I'm going to try and simplify even further by explaining why you might want closed loop tension control rather than explaining how it works (...

Trim / waste disposal is a subject that is integral to efficient winding, but conceptually it can be a bit difficult to explain to customers who aren't familiar with managing waste. A lot of companies go to great lengths to try and minimise the amount of waste they generate, which makes sense as far as economics and environmental awareness, but sometimes waste cannot be avoided. The video below shows a trim winder that was a part of a l arge slitter we recently built for a regular customer of ours.  This slitter rewinder was designed to convert large rolls of metallized polyester, which is supplied on rolls that are not coated the full width of the web, so a trim needs to be cut off during the winding / slitting process.  Some customers wind trim waste material onto cores on the rewind shafts, and some let narrow trims fall to the floor, but while both options are workable both can be problematic for operators and potentially damaging to materials. Trim winders l...

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...

We are about to publish a new company brochure and I'd like the readers of my blog (and my Twitter followers) the chance to be the first to receive a copy.  If you would like a copy of our new brochure please email brochure@ucel.co.uk and I'll send a copy over right away.