Accuracy and consistency are paramount when it comes to customers and their identity on the shelf. Every brand has a logo, a colour, a label, a quick moment to introduce themselves to their customer with their product sitting on a shelf amongst a slew of nearly identical products. Their packing is often their selling point.
“Your job is to make that packaging accurately and consistently perfect, every single time,” notes Andrew Maxwell, Managing Director, Maxteq. “In order to do that there are hundreds of processes that come together, one of the most important is your anilox. More specifically, your anilox roll volume. Maintaining your anilox roll volume ensures less wastage, less downtime, accurate ink film thickness and consistency.”
The problem many press operators face is knowing exactly what the anilox roll volume is. Most of the time it’s a guess until plugging or wear becomes an issue and the first signs of this are of course when the colour on the run changes and consistency is lost. By this time, there’s already been plenty of wastage.
With plugging and wear having such a large impact on consistency, it makes it more important to know the volume of the anilox roll. In order to do this, Maxteq recommends a scope such as the Troika AniCam to measure volume. Simply put, the Troika AniCam is an anilox management system, which helps the user determine and maintain the roll volume by measuring the depth of the anilox cells. By measuring this depth, and the shape of the cells, the user can easily determine if an anilox is plugged or worn before consistency or colour is lost.
Maxteq now offers Anilox Audits where a trained technician will come to your site and perform an anilox audit on every single anilox you have, then prepare a full report on the current state of each anilox in comparison to its original volume. An audit can show if loss of volume is from plugging or wear or perhaps both. These audits can also show if there are any scoring lines from the doctor blade on the anilox.
Caption:
Andrew Maxwell, Managing Director at Maxteq, says Troika Anicam helps customers stay on top of their anilox ‘health’
