MOVE OVER WILLY WONKA
When's the last time you took a factory tour that was really cool? I love taking tours and seeing how stuff is made. My favorite movie, with manufacturing in it, is Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory - I love Chocolate! My most recent favorite factory tour is a super-modern plant in Southern Massachusetts, USA where they die cut photo album pages. Yes sir, that's all they make! Talk about specialized - these guys are the industry experts and all the big buyers like Kmart, Target, and Walmart know it! So, what makes up a photo album page and why in the world was this tour so cool, you ask? Intricacy, accuracy, tough to cut materials, and un-bridled speed! - I love die cutting!
There are three layers that make up any of the thousands of sizes of pages that are made at this factory. Two polyester layers .025mm (.001") thick make up the outer protective covers, and an interior paper layer .125mm (.005") thick makes up the background and inner stiffening layer. Bring these layers together and suddenly you have a sandwich of hard and soft layers that like to cut in different ways from one another and create problems with everything from abrasion and static to shrinkage during processing. The materials start together and are then slit to the right width (paper and poly are actually different widths and the paper may be in several parts within the same single page), glued (creates the partitions for the individual pictures within a page), rotary hole punched (so you can bind them into your album cover), sheeted to an exact length, and delivered to packaging, all on one machine.
The most amazing part is the speed at which these bus length presses run.
On average these customized German and US made machines run at 200 meters per minute (650 feet per minute) and can push upwards of 300 meters per minute (1,000 FPM) when called upon to really crank! For you flatbed people out there that converts to approximately 1,500 impressions per minute (90,000 per hour) with a 200mm (8 inch) repeat. The diecutting part of this operation can't actually be seen at this kind of speed so my guide slowed one down to a mere 25 meters per minute (80FPM) so I could almost see what was happening. Matched metal rotary punches cut and cleared the holes while a rotary shear blade turned the roll goods into sheeted goods. At this kind of speed, each one of these machines (there were at least eight of them in-line) can produce way more than one million average size pages during two shifts including die changes, set-ups and coffee breaks…. And get this - they want to increase their running speeds! When the pages are done they move on to a gigantic warehouse where enormous cyborg creatures surgically pick and place their electronically selected loads. This part of the tour actually scared me……
I really enjoyed this tour of super fast diecutting, and I hadn't really planned on taking it. Now, if I could just get that die cut foot care product place, Dr. Scholl's Company, to return my calls!
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