Technicon’s Rajeev Gandotra said to us months ago, that his company is entering packaging and would show its first developments at the Printpack show. At Printpack it has brought its new INVERTicon carton batch inverter and its CARTONist carton packer which are meant as efficient gathering and packaging devices to be put at the end of folder gluers for crash-lock and lock bottom folding cartons. In most converting workflows for these types of cartons, the fast throughput of the folder-gluer is limited by the inability to efficiently collect the cartons in a compact stack and then put them into the transport carton.
The INVERTicon inverts batches of cartons so that a level stack is produced without this being done by a person standing at the end of the folder gluer. The compact and level stacks can be produced at speeds up to 75,000 cartons an hour by automatically inverting cartons at a user-specified number or interval. The next inline machine, the CARTONist allows ergonomic filling of the with the compact stack from the previous steps, and then automatically closes the carton and automatically tape seals the top and bottom and then applies a transport track and trace label in the last step.
The machines being shown at Printpack are worth a look for high volume carton printers and converters since their folder-gluer are generally the fastest machines in their workflow and the manual labor to gather and make compact stacks can generally never keep up. This seems like a plausible and useful piece of automation that can reduce tedious labor and manual handling, enabling converters to run their folder-gluers at much higher speeds.
Also at the Technicon stand at the show (Technicon is mainly recognized by the industry as a newspaper mailroom automation supplier) was Erich Midlik, the executive vice president of Prime UV the curing systems company. Midlik’s company helped pioneered the use of UV curing of color supplements printed on newspaper web offset presses. These were and are used to produce higher saturation print on smoother substrates such as glazed newsprint and light weight coated papers.
