In early April 2017, Bobst held an open house at Concord Printing in Vadodara to showcase and demonstrate the versatility of its Bobst Folder Gluer Vision Fold 110 A2. Around 16 Gujarat-based print service providers and converters attended the live demonstration. Uniquely equipped with 4- and 6-corner making options, the Vision Fold enables Concord to finish tray, straight line, and lock-bottom cartons at a speed of 350 meters a minute. The team of Packaging South Asia reports …
Speaking about the recent installation of the Vision Fold 110, Concord Printing’s owner Arshaad Memon says, “When nothing matters more than the quality of your final product, you need the equipment that can deliver quality and consistency. Earlier, with the carton flap pasted manually, we could only finish around 8,000 lock-bottom cartons in a day, while the customer used to face the pasting issue of boxes. No matter how good the print quality or timely delivery, this manual pasting spoiled the job for the customer.
“With the installation of the new folder-gluer with its 4- and 6-corner options, productivity has increased and we can finish over 40,000 lock-bottom cartons in an hour. As per our need, the Vision Fold handles all the styles including complex boxes and also delivers consistent quality with fast changeovers. The initial capital investment is huge but it promises a stress-free working environment as we are actively supported by Bobst’s service team. Bobst is the one that gives the reliability – Bobst is trust.”
When four-and-a-half-decade-old Concord Printing encountered a period of slow growth in commercial print, it diversified to monocartons for the food, pharma and FMCG segments. The diversification also entailed the installation of a 25 x 36 inch RMGT 920 6-colour plus coater offset press. The full UV sheetfed offset press has six AMS P3 UV cassette curing systems. Concord plans to further expand its packaging capabilities by acquiring an Esko cutting and creasing sample-making table for carton prototypes.
During the open house, Puneet Aggarwal, national sales head for Bobst’s Folding Carton unit, explained the folder gluer’s long structure, “To run the Vision Fold entirely at the speed of 350 meters a minute, we need the machine to be at least 12 meters long. And since the folder gluer already has the required length and space, a converter can retrofit the 4- and 6-corner module at any time.”
Straight line and crash-lock bottoms are standard capabilities on the Vision Fold. For processing 4-corner boxes, the entire setup is controlled from the CUBE interface in just a few seconds. The only tool required for settings and changeovers is Tomy-bar and the remote interface to machine. The live demo of changeovers from tray to straight line cartons in less than half an hour impressed many of the visitors at the open house.
Blanking option and Speedwave folder gluers explained
The Bobst team also took the opportunity to conduct a short technology seminar. Since most converters only die cut cartons on an autoplaten and then manually separate the blanks, automated blank separation in the diecutter was explained. So far, twenty autoplated diecutters with blanking options have been installed in India.
For boosting the speed on folder gluers, the Bobst team at the open house at Concord talked about Speedwave—a no hooks device for folding crash-lock boxes. By choosing Speedwave, customers can achieve incredible production speeds and considerably reduce downtime and setting times of Bobst folder-gluers. The Speedwave option is available on Bobst Expert and Master folder gluers.
