Slitter Man

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...

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. ...

Core Cutters have been at the forefront of my mind over the last few days, mostly because we have been working with our video team on a new demonstration video for our Automatic Core Cutter . You can view our rather smart new video below, and you can find out more about Automatic Core Cutters (and of course buy one) by contact me directly or by visiting  https://www.universalconvertingequipment.com/core-cutters/automatic-core-cutter P.S I'm taking bookings for Core Cutter demos down here in Ipswich at the moment, so get in touch if you want to come and have a go on one of our demonstration machines!

Today I've been busy with core cutter demos, more specifically I've been demonstrating our CCA Automatic Core Cutter .  An increasing number of companies are coming to us to investigate the huge cost savings that can be made by buying in cores in full lengths rather than as cut cores . One conversation with a customer re-enforced the advantage of having a core cutter 'in-house' to salvage core off-cuts left over from other jobs. A topic that often pops up when speaking to customers about core cutters is supply chain risk, and how owning (or leasing) a core cutter allows companies to minimise risk by buying in large quantities of full length cores (at a discount) and cutting their own extensive stock of cores.  This makes a lot of sense to me - for the small cost of buying a core cutter you can avoid your production managers tearing their hair out because they have slitting jobs to run but no cores on which to wind onto! So in conclusion I think our automatic core ...