Slitter Man

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, ...

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...