3 minute read
How to combine flexo printing technology, expertise and partnerships to mak amazing things happen
How to combine flexo printing technology, expertise, and partnerships to make Amazing Things Happen
With every new format, consumer fad, market trend, and brand-owner‘s demand, the packaging business gets more competitive and the pressure on printers increases. Premiumization, personalization, shorter runs, sustainability, shorter lead time, lower costs — this is the world we operate in.
As everyone knows, your printing can‘t begin until the plates are mounted. It‘s the starting point, and a pivotal aspect of every run. We work hand-inhand our customers to help printers, operators and plant managers to overcome their challenges.
Print quality in flexo is improving continuously and is competing with standards of gravure print quality, the importance of the right plate mounting solution is critical. The right solution and density are crucial in transferring the image to the substrate as accurately as possible. Futhermore, since brand owners have many changes in their design and want to minimize the time to market, the amount of job changes is increasing. This puts a lot of pressure on the mounting department and the press operators to get the maximum efficiency out of their press with the lowest amount of downtime possible.
tesa® Softprint
tesa® Softprint plate mounting tapes are specially developed to provide the highest quality levels of both print quality and process efficiency. tesa® Softprint are made from high quality materials that ensure best performance in bonding, handling, and printing.
This performance can be reach not only with our adhesives but also because we do not apply stress to the foam during our manufacturing. When all foam cells are untouched and undamanaged, the foam is better able to absorb bounce from the sleeves that can leave chatter, or gear marks. Further more it will be more resilient. The foam will compress and return to the same thickness over and over and over, from the first impression to the last. This would result in beautiful prints from the fine screens to deep to deep solida areas, whether the job is a few thousand or a few million feet.
Amazing Things Happen
Self-adhesive tesa® Twinlock layer
Stablization layer Open cell polyurethane foam
Base sleeve
tesa® Twinlock
The unique concept of tesa® Twinlock is to provide sustainable and reusable plate mounting solutions for cost efficient and consistenly high-quality print jobs. The basis for this technology begins with the select of a base sleeve or cylinder from the customer‘s preferred supplier. We then add a polyurethane (PU) foam layer to the top of the base sleeve. The PU foam is coated with an unique polymer that has the characterisitcs to remain permanently tacky. When proper cleaning and handling procedures are observed, the tesa® Twinlock sleeves can be used for a very long period.
Our adhesive plate mounting sleeves provide exceptional print quality. Even after long press times, the sleeves produce accurate and reliable results. The consistent print quality is attributed to our open-cell foam structure. Through this foam structure, our sleeves absorb bouncing effects to improve print quality. A second critical fctor that influences print quality is our strick diameter tolerances. We use laser technology to measure our sleeves and ensure they meet customer exact requirements.
With tesa® Twinlock, we enable:
• High printing speeds • Lasting print quality without the need for adjustments • Excellent registration
The main advantage of this technology is the reusability of the self-adhesive sleeve. When best practices are observed, our reusable sleeves have the potential to be used fo a very long period of time. In most cases, our tesa® Twinlock sleeves only need to be recoated when physical damage occurs to the base sleeve or coating. Flexo printers benefits from:
• Lower running cost • Carbon footprint reduction • Fast ROI when reusing the same repeats • A more precise estimate of input production costs
