Are you still skeptical on the use of synthetic doctor blades in your flexographic printing process? While it may be natural to have doubts, the benefits of these blades may be too good to ignore. Today's technology in synthetic doctor blades is not like the "plastic blades" of the past. Esterlam's biaxially oriented polyester offers … Read More...
Cleaning flexographic printing plates after a press run and prior to storage can quickly become a bottleneck, eventually piling up and lead to a labor intensive and undesirable job to accomplish manually. Left uncleaned, plates can be damaged or offer poor print results in subsequent press runs. With APR's line of Automatic Plate Washers, this task … Read More...
Dirty print is something many flexographic printers may struggle with. An online search will reveal quite a few cause and effect diagrams or charts for possible solutions for the common issue. In some cases printers go through the gamut, making sure their ink is in spec, dryers are balanced, adding slower drying solvents to the … Read More...
Plateroom Process Control Video Series We all know that pressroom process control is important, but plateroom process control is equally important and sometimes gets overlooked. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how good your pressroom controls are if you are sending out subpar or irregular plates. Nothing in these videos is groundbreaking, just a friendly reminder of … Read More...
Flat-Top Dots Let’s start by stating what is meant by the term flat-top dot. A flat-top dot on a photopolymer plate is one that accepts the transfer of data from an imaging device to the finished plate at a 1:1 ratio. The 1:1 imaging ratio is measured in the file, post-CDI imaging, and ultimately on the … Read More...
Why should I expect plate quality to improve by bringing in platemaking in-house versus what I experience with professionals that focus solely on platemaking and prepress? An incentive to bring platemaking in-house is often cost savings and fear of a press going down if a plate is damaged, missing, or worn out. In short, what … Read More...
Easy to Check - Often Missed Print repeats play an important roll in the performance of the finished product. You may have a beautifully executed award-winning package, however if your repeats are out of specification tolerances you may have to throw the product away. Worse yet, the product could make its way to the packaging … Read More...
Hardness, Density, or Compression? If you see someone measuring a foam mounting tape with a durometer gauge or have done so yourself in order to measure hardness, density, compressibility…hit PAUSE. With all due respect to tape supplier(s), the durometer (measurement of hardness) is not a correct method of measurement or term that should be used when … Read More...
The title of this article is meant to address a common mistake platemakers make when performing both a main exposure and back exposure step test. We see this happen more frequently on main exposure tests because the lamp cycle is much longer than a back exposure step test. With conventional bank light exposure systems, we … Read More...
The Resins Remain Behind We have hand cleaned anilox rolls using stainless steel brushes and primarily caustic chemicals, ultrasonic, and media blasting [which can limits some line counts on anilox rolls based on the particulate size of the media]. Most recently we have seen high-pressure solution wash systems that use detergents, chemicals, and water. The … Read More...