During the India Packaging Show we met Rajan Nijhawan a well-versed practitioner in three essential interlinked aspects of the packaging industry — corrugated boxes, flexography, and die making. Mr Nijhawan has been a supplier of MacDermid flexo plate materials as well Karl Marbach dies and Stoma equipment and know-how to the industry. The big news at the packaging show was that his company Trident is building up a new project in Pune for making flexo plates in the first phase and quality dies and tools in the second phase.
The Trident project in the first phase will occupy 5000 square feet and come up in the first quarter of 2009 with the installation of a Kodak Thermoflex 5280 digital imager and a MacDermid processor. Since the Thermoflex Wide II (as the 5280 is also known) is capable of exposing DITR films it will be used for making waterwashed liquid plates as well. This is an important cost saving and environment friendly technology in which Nijhawan has both expertise and experience.
There are already three Kodak Thermoflex digital flexo plate device installations in the country although they are not as wide as the one that Trident is importing. The new Trident project will drive its flexo imager with a battery of 5 to 7 workstations using predominantly Kodak prepress technology. There will be a digital suite for corrugated packaging and Kodak’s Prinergy Powerpack, with Pandora, Maxtone hybrid screening, Hyperflex which uses UV energy to make stronger dots, and Dotshop. Other features of the packaging software including Digicap, PDF compare and merge, and both batch trapping and an advance trap editor. Structural design of packaging will use the EngView CAD software. In fact, EngView’s CAM software will drive the digital cutting and creasing sampling tables that Kodak plans to show at GraphExpo in Chicago as it gears up its end-to-end packaging solutions.
In the second phase of Trident’s Pune project, it will set up a die-making plant using Marbach and Stoma technology. In the meanwhile the company has been instrumental in the Diehard Dies project that is coming up in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. This project, which will be installed and commissioned in the second half of November, will provide rotary dies for corrugated carton making and flatbed dies and flexible magnetic dies for label presses. The Diehard plant owned by PR Prabhu will also manufacture embossing dies.
