Intermediate Web Guides

Used before a critical process in the converting line 

In our previous post on web guiding fundamentals, we mentioned the terminal web guides. These are web guides that are found at the start or the end of the process. Their location is usually on an unwind or a rewind stand. As we discussed, their installation depends on whether the guiding system is used for unwinding a roll of web or rewind a processed web into a roll.

The web at the start and end of your converting line needs to be properly aligned to have a good conversion process and a well wound roll for your customers

It's an advantage to know what you are dealing with when aligning your web as it enters your converting process or is being wound into a processed roll. Here's some information that should be of help to you.

As you prepared the marketing budget for 2021, trade shows probably put a big question mark on your plan...

We sat late last year discussing this particular item while preparing our 2021 budget.

Trade shows hit a huge speed bump with all the restrictions caused by Covid-19. We just didn't know if people were going to attend or if exhibitors would participate. In talking to partners and customers we found that this was a variable that was up in the air.

A customer once asked us why would you need web guiding on a brand new machine? Their point of view was that the machine was state of the art, the web guide didn't move at all during operation, and they didn't see any problems with their materials. Well, our answer was that there are four main reasons why any converting line requires web guides.

As a converter that deals with the day to day operation of a converting line you probably run into issues with communication within your operation, or externally with suppliers. Your problem is how do you efficiently get your point across? It definitely helps if you use the proper terminology or understand other terms used in the industry. We want to help you with that with our Web Guiding Fundamentals series.

Web Guiding Upgrade Applications

Imagine running a converting operation that has multiple converting lines. Each of these lines has been in operation for at least 20 years. You have invested in many improvements to the line, but are now faced with aging web guiding systems that are starting to fail.

At first, you manage to work with the deficiencies they have.

Slitting a roll of printed labels or even monitoring the label printing process, you just might need a line or contrast sensing application for guiding.

Many converting operations from the 60’s up to the 90’s adopted pneumo-hydraulic web guiding systems, especially in blown film lines, extrusion lines, flexographic printing presses and paper converting machines. These systems were a combination of a pneumatic sensor and  a hydraulic power unit and control to actuate a hydraulic cylinder to move the guide assembly.

In the last few blog posts we saw how Roll-2-Roll^® Sensor compares to common sensors, to vision systems and specifically to line scan camera based vision systems. We saw that the Roll-2-Roll^® Sensor system is an intelligent embedded sensor with vision capabilities.

In a previous blog post we saw how Roll-2-Roll^® Sensor is not just a simple sensor but more like a vision based system that is simpler to use. Specifically we saw that they are more like a 1D line scan camera.