Ceepackaging

Investment

Film flexographic printing machinery acquired

Roberts Mart & Co. Ltd, established in 1852, is a privately owned 6th generation family business, specialising in high quality flexographic printing and converting of flexible films and in addition having their own, blown film extrusion business, Romar Packaging Ltd. close by to their new factory in Leeds.

On this occasion they chose Bobst Group for their main capital machinery investment which includes a Fischer & Krecke Flexographic printing press model FP – 14S incorporating the innovation-award winning ‘smartGPSTM System’ (Graphic Positioning System). Also part of the investment was a new Titan Model ER610 slitter rewinder. The total investment was GBP £2m.

The new F&K is a fully gearless machine with direct drive to the C.I. Cylinder and uses sleeve technology for both printing plates and anilox. The machine incorporates a new ‘retractable’ inter-colour dryer design for maximum accessibility and an advanced operator control system. The new press joins 3 existing flexo machines.

Mr. William Roberts, Managing Director of Roberts Mart commented “After trials at F&K in Bielefeld, Germany, using our own materials we concluded that this press was exceptionally stable and the results using smartGPSTM very decisive.”
We concluded that ‘smartGPSTM’ would be a very important key to our investment since we are strong believers in automation and we could see immediately that the ‘smartGPSTM’ system would significantly reduce start-up waste, (materials; energy etc) in addition to greatly reducing set-up times, whilst also providing the correct print impression with the first ‘kiss’ of the plate to substrate. In the past, our printers had first to print and then any necessary adjustments were made an automated camera system with some manual final adjustments, all whilst the press was running.
Today, with the ‘smartGPSTM’ system, all the above parameters for register and impression (measuring the topography of the mounted plates) are measured and down-loaded to an RFID chip in the plate sleeve during plate mounting. Once the sleeves are loaded into the machine all data is transmitted immediately to the machine computer. All this is achieved whilst the machine is at a standstill.”

Part of the equipment supplied by F&K is a special plate mounting machine which enables register and optimum impression settings to be calculated at the plate mounting stage.

Mr. Roberts further commented “After only 3 months of production, we are very close to achieving the full potential of ‘smartGPSTM’.  We are confident that we will soon see the benefits of the system’s very advanced technology.”
We can say that the measuring process in the mounter takes just a few minutes longer, but this is more than recovered as after loading the next job the press is immediately in register and in ‘kiss’ impression. The pre-settings are not affected when accelerating to production speed. The operators retain overall quality control and our experienced operators appreciate very much the efficiency of the system.  However, our new operators see that they have few set up procedures to perform before a new print job.  ‘smartGPSTM’ does it all for them - all they have to do is check that everything is OK!”