A day after Uteco’s Flex-on-Road event on 30 November, Ahmedabad witnessed one more seminar on flexo’s mono-carton production capabilities. The seminar, organized by Edale and DuPont at Crowne Plaza Ahmedabad on 1 December, was attended by eminent members from the printing and packaging industry. The ‘Game Changing Single-Pass Carton Production Event’ showed a live demonstration of the FL5 single-pass carton production line from Edale’s UK factory.
Mohanish Satam, sales manager, India, Cyrel Solutions, DuPont, in his presentation on flexo printing, highlighted the benefits of flexo plates, current packaging trends, and how the industry is shifting towards flexo printing due to its quality and a higher demand for short-run jobs.
“The print results of flexo are much higher compared to any other technologies. It reduces the overall cost of print per unit, and is versatile because one plate can print on paper, duplex board, flexible film, and foils,” Satam said. He claims the extended color gamut and fixed color palette are replacing the Pantone colors.
Informing the audience about Printers Supply Company’s foray into flexo, Amitabh Luthra, managing director of the company, discussed its partnership with Edale and its effects on the Indian flexo market.
Darren Pickford, sales director, Edale – a provider of flexographic printing and converting solutions for the packaging industry — hosted a live demonstration of the FL5 machine. He said it provides all the benefits of single-pass carton production while delivering the highest quality to meet premium brand requirements and maintaining exceptional print quality and registration. It has enhanced embellishment capabilities, combining both front and back, foiling, lamination, crease, emboss, braille, die-cut, and waste stripping and collation of the final product. “The FL5 starts with a reel of board and produces a finished and stripped die-cut carton with all the required features in a single pass,” Pickford said.
The FL5 boasts a web width of 600mm(24”) and a repeat size of up to 711.2 mm (28”). This is in line with the previous generation of machine’s USP of being greater than a B2 plus sheet size, which the team of Edeale believes will be the most appealing to carton makers. The machine has eight flexographic printing units and can run a wide range of materials, industry plastics, and films on a carton thickness from 12 microns to 700 microns.
It is ideal for short-run work from 1000-100,000 units and reconfigurable for a wide range of sizes and forms. The benefits include reduced setup time and running waste, short runs, and multiple changes with ease and only one skilled operator is needed for the process.
Highlighting the need for only one skilled operator, Darron Shimmons, print and application manager of Edale, who was present at the UK factory in the live demonstration, did the whole job of producing cartons solely and later on showcased how easily the job changeovers can be done on the machine.
The live demonstration at the seminar ended with an appeal to ‘Combine print, cut, crease, braille embossing, and waste removal in a single-pass machine with the FL5 carton production line, ideal for embellished, sustainable, paper-based die cut cartons’.
