Slitter Man

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!

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...