Find out about flatbed, rotary, and laser diecutting systems
By Mike Bacon
What does your die cutting department look like? Do you have multiple flatbed presses chunking along, making parts for your mobile phone, automotive part or gasket customers? Are rotary diecutting units rolling along at 450 ft/min to produce labels?
Over the past several years, converting departments have been forced to change along with the rest of the printing world due to the overwhelming demand for shorter runs. Traditional diecutting equipment continues to make up the majority of converting departments. While the types of parts produced have stayed within the general spectrum of the specialty printing, digital printing has become more acceptable, forcing diecutting equipment to evolve. Diecutting systems on the market today offer many options, such as inline lamination, UV coating, sheeting, slitting, hot stamping, embossing, and more. Rotary diecutting and galvo-laser diecutting equipment act as full converting lines while traditional flatbed diecutting sys-tems offer forms of converting depending on applications.
The goal of this article is to educate industrial and specialty printers about the many opportunities in their own diecutting or converting departments. It will compare flatbed, rotary, and laser diecutting to offer solutions for a variety of converting needs. As specialty printers see a proliferation of different material types in a range of thicknesses, finding the right diecutting equipment that positively affects your company’s bottom line can be a massive undertaking.
Laser diecutting
Within the laser die cutting circle there are two types of beam delivery: gantry and galvonometer (galvo). Gantry systems use a laser source where the laser head either moves around on an X-Y plotter system or remains stationary as the material moves into position under the head. This type of cutting has proven successful for high-precision parts like membrane switches, where tight-tolerance cutting around plug-ins or switches is critical. Gantry systems also have inherent benefits when cutting materials thicker than 800 μm or wide-format printing. The biggest complaint about gantry laser systems seems to be the running speed. Since either the material or the head needs to physically move into position around the cutting pattern, the gantry system can be very slow. There are applications in automotive-part manufacturing where laser heads are mounted to the end of robots so that precision and relative speed can work in tandem.
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