Product category:
Printing Presses Ancillary Equipment
News Release from: Harper Corporation of America
Edited by the Printingtalk Editorial
Team on 05 October 2005
Blind Quality Testing Anilox Rolls
Global anilox supplier Harper Corporation has completed a blind quality control study, where its Charlotte, Green Bay (USA) and Bangkok (Thailand) operations fulfilled fictitious anilox roll orders.
Global anilox supplier Harper Corporation has completed a blind quality control study, where Charlotte, Green Bay (USA) and Bangkok (Thailand) operations received and filled fictitious anilox roll orders without the awareness of manufacturing management Ron Harper, chief executive officer of Harper Corporation, said: "This testing programme, which included a total of nine anilox rolls, was developed to verify our digital cell volume manufacturing systems globally, therefore validating the systems all the way to press
This article was originally published on Printingtalk on 17 Aug 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Whilst our quality control teams and ISO systems provide assurance within each manufacturing facility, comparing the end products of those facilities 'in press' is the true acid test of quality on a global scale.
This, too, provides our OEM partners and their new press customers with added confidence in situations where new press anilox sets are supplemented with rolls from another Harper location once the press is installed." The test involved the manufacturing and testing of three 10" Mark Andy rolls, with screen counts of 400, 600 and 800 lines, and 60-degree hexagonal Platinum surface engravings.
The anilox volumes included Echotopography Digital Volume (EDV) measuring 3.7, 2.5 and 1.8 BCM (billion cubic microns), respectively.
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Only after manufacturing was complete on the Platinum laser-engraved rolls did each manufacturing location receive the shipping destination - Harper's Charlotte corporate facility.
Once the rolls arrived, there were no additional inspections made before the in-press test.
The anilox rolls were taken to the Flexographic Trade School and run one after the other, in sequence by line screen.
Again, testing was blind until the final density results were obtained.
The ink colour run for density testing was cyan, with inks provided by Environmental Inks During the press run, no special effort was made to match colour between rolls but rather to focus on obtaining good, equalised impression.
Density results for the 400-line, 3.7 BCM anilox rolls were 2.06, 2.09 and 2.1, indicating a total variation range of 1.9 per cent.
For the 600-line anilox rolls, density results were 2.03, 2.06 and 2.08, or a variation range of 2.4 per cent.
Densities for the 800-line anilox rolls were 1.95, 1.96 and 2.0, resulting in a variation range of 2.5 per cent.
Pete Hartman, a former printing plant manager and Harper Corporation's vice president of sales, said: "With a maximum colour variation of 2.5 per cent in tests that involved nine different rolls, our sales and service teams are absolutely certain that we can achieve a match print for any global colour from any one of our worldwide operations.
Whilst we have always been confident of this and our customer satisfaction has attested to it, running the tests proves it absolutely and without doubt." Art Ehrenburg, Harper's vice president of operations, attributes the results to the manufacturing team's pursuit of accurate quality measurement systems in the laser engraving set-up process.
He explained: "Ever since we adopted EDV measurement for the calibration burns on every single anilox roll we engrave, there has been a quantifiable change in volume consistency.
With our EDV system, there is no human variation, as there is with a microscope.
By statistical analysis testing, we determined that measurement accuracy would improve by 100 per cent.
When we adopted EDV as our set-up measurement device, though costly, it allowed us to guarantee colour matches between anilox rolls made on different lasers and at different locations.
The result is that we can globally guarantee colour matches for a colour such as Coke Red, in multiple printing presses.".
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