The Best Way to Obtain High-Quality Gold Luster for Sheetfed Gravure

In the second half of 2002, Van Lijsebetten’s turnover increased by 2%, as the overall turnover of the Belgian printing industry decreased by 18%. Drukkerij Van Lijsebetten was founded by Guide Van Lijsebetten in 1968 and is located in Sint-Niklaas in the western part of the province of Vianitppe in Belgium. It is a family business. More than 60% of the company's turnover comes from packaging and printing, and the rest is wet plastic labels and commercial printing. About 95% of the company's products are placed on the Belgian market, and some of the remaining products are placed on the Dutch market. Finally, these products are exported to all parts of the world. The company employs approximately 130 people and has a turnover of approximately 20 million euros. It is located in the top 30 printing companies in Belgium. Drukkerij Van Lijsebetten's proud business philosophy is to provide its customers with "full service", that is, from prepress, printing to postpress, all processing links can be completed by the company.

Finding a solution for high quality gold luster

Many printing companies must encounter such a situation: When a customer takes a printed sample, he hopes that his work can get the same effect and quality as the sample. Mr. Van Lijsebetten from Belgium, who founded Drukkerji Van Lijsebetten, described his experience. “One of our largest customers showed us a cardboard box printed in Italy that had a surprisingly golden effect and many effects that we couldn't replicate. The customer said: 'This is the golden effect I want. If you can't do it, I'm sorry I can only find other printing companies.' This matter has aroused our morale."

He explained in detail that his partner company had spent seven years looking for a process to show the effect of metallic materials, making it look really like metal, bronzing can achieve that effect, but it is expensive and can not Overprint as a bottom layer. Although bronzing is technically feasible, the gold effect is not good. We first tested with offset printing and tried to print various gold and silver effects. The result was good on high-gloss paper, but a large amount of gloss was lost on the non-smooth paperboard. When an aqueous coating is applied to gold or silver, the gold or silver sheen is completely lost due to oxidation of the metal in the ink, losing brightness and turning brown or green. ”

Since then, the company has sought help from long-term suppliers, including Heidelberg. “Heidelberg advised us to use flexo printing on the offset printing line. At first, this seems to be the solution to the problem.” Van Lijsebetten continued, “So we've been experimenting on these combo machines for a few years and we’ve used Heidelberg's off-line glazing system, but such a combined machine takes a long time to find the right production task, and the problem is that the clear text cannot be printed on the flexographic plate. The requirements, its wear resistance is also not satisfactory.

Next, he began to realize that high-quality golden luster could be obtained by gravure printing. "But at that time, we knew that there were rotogravure printing, and the company's business type was mainly sheetfed offset printing, so we did not pay enough attention to the gravure printing process. But we saw from the samples provided by customers that gravure printing is what we need. So, through hard work, we found a sheet-fed gravure press in the market. After examining various alternative products, we finally determined that the performance of the Moog machine was the best."

“The supplier guarantees that the Moog machine can print the effect we want, so we ordered a two-unit press for metal effect printing and glazing. We wait for a German machine on the Moog machine during the delivery of the machine. The user had a test print to verify the performance of this machine and we soon discovered that this machine can provide what we need.”

As early as 2002, the maximum size of a sheet of paper that can be printed on the Moog 2 TBR machine that has been produced is 74×104 cm. This model is equipped with automatic ink viscosity control of Opticolor and Heliofum electrostatic auxiliary equipment from Spengler Electronics to ensure the roller outlets. The ink in the ink is completely transferred to the substrate.

Moog sheetfed presses have a variety of features

The company also has a UV dryer on a Moog machine that is not normally mounted on an intaglio press. Mr. Van Lijsebetton explained: “The Moog machines provide UV drying equipment that just meets our desire to know what the desire for UV technology is. Therefore, we conducted a series of interesting experiments, such as printing offset printed sheets on Moog. The glazing printing gave surprising results: The gloss meter measured a value of 98 points, almost reaching a value of 100 points in the glass state.Usually, the UV flexographic printing only reached 85. We also used the same coating. Tests were conducted on Moog and rotary presses. Moog printed gloss of 92 and rotary press 82."

UV Varnish is radical and does not require preheating. The UV coating was applied and cured with a Grafix dryer. The dryer had three 150 watt/cm water-cooled drying lamps. The lamps were equipped with a switch that turned off when the printer slowed down until it stopped. “At present, we do not need a special unit to polish, because the special coating unit is usually used to coat the entire prints and all the jobs. The number of coating products is at least 500. We do not need to polish them. Moog can polish 4,000 to 8,000 prints in an hour, depending on the type of job, because coating with a large amount of coating requires a longer time of drying.” explains Mr. Van Lijsebetten. .

Correspondingly, this two-color printing press can be fully used for the printing of four-color or six-color jobs. “In fact, we are not only treating Moog as a printing press, but as a finishing machine and also owning a UV device. Incredibly, this machine did not cost us too much money. UV device When used in combination with gravure, we can apply a very smooth coating to the thick coating to get a mirror-like gloss effect. Gravure printing has undoubtedly bridged the gap in the production chain. Although the machine was configured to print metal effects , but it will allow us to produce better-looking products to meet customer requirements and achieve greater benefits."

This gravure printing press is also used in the gold printing process, or it can be used to print a golden solid background and then overprint it with offset printing. “In the past, the company had produced a large number of lived products with gold effects, and the products used for luxury food packaging were very impressive,” recalls Mr. Van Lijsebetten. "However, Moog can provide good additional benefits for other high-end products such as tobacco, hair dye and wine packaging."

Moog sheet-fed gravure printing press is easy to operate

Traditional printing was done on a Heiderlberg Speedmaster six-color sheet-fed press. These presses consisted of three six-color CD102 machines, an 8-color 102 machine, a four-color 52 machine, and a GTO machine. More than 80% of the packaging orders are printed on the CD102 machine, the latter process uses water-based coating, and its printing range from 80g/m2 for label printing to 1mm cardboard (about 60g/m2) ). "These printing presses are suitable for the printing of the above-mentioned quantitative papers. Everything will work just fine if you simply follow the instructions in the Heidelberg workbook," said Mr. Van Lijsebetten. After the printing is completed, the printing products are subjected to embossing and die cutting. These processes are mostly completed on three Bobst SP-104-E automatic flat presses. The printing department can use two-shift or three-shift rotation according to the workload, and other departments can rotate in two shifts to maximize work.

Source: Huayin