Hammer Packaging Installs New KBA Press
DALLAS, TX—KBA North America announced that Hammer Packaging, a package printing company headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., has installed a new KBA Rapida 162 64-inch eight-color sheetfed press plus coater and additional key accessories, such as a roll-to-sheet feeder, KBA Densitronic Professional color control system, and lightweight paper package. The press installation makes Hammer the only packaging printer in North America with this type of press configuration.
“Our successful mantra has always been to innovate,” says Jim Hammer, president and CEO, Hammer Packaging. “We lead the industry, not follow. We chose to partner with KBA because we feel that they are well-attuned to the market and our relationship has been very good since we purchased our first large-format press from them in 2005. Our new KBA Rapida 162 will be assigned to produce, cut, and stack labels for our high-end national accounts and we anticipate it will be running three shifts right away.”
“Most of our competitors predominantly have six-color presses,” explains Hammer, “and we’ve found that our customers will design their labels utilizing all eight colors. This differentiates us from our competitors. The lightweight paper package is especially important in our market because our customers are trying to shed as much weight as possible on their products to reduce costs. We’re seeing an increase in the use of lighter weight label stock and our press is equipped to handle it. Furthermore, we specified the KBA Densitronic spectrophotometer color control system because it is used on all of our presses; it allows us to easily repeat customer jobs thus allowing us to shorten customer run lengths, while keeping their inventories low and allowing them to change their graphics as often as they wish. Oftentimes, our customers ask for process information in order to map the job for quality control. We need this type of high-end technology from KBA to better maintain our own edge as well as provide detailed information for our customers.”
Over the past eight years, Hammer’s customers have increasingly turned to cut-and-stack labels printed on film. Unlike paper labels, film can be clear, giving designers the additional capability to reverse print, as well as surface print. Hammer specified that the new KBA press needed to have a 12-foot extended delivery in order to dry the film substrates run on the press. “We print a fair amount of oriented polypropylene,” says Hammer, “and we need the extended delivery to cure the job at full speed.”
Having highly-automated machinery and features are key components at Hammer Packaging. This automation allows less hands-on work from Hammer’s operating team, freeing them to focus on quality and productivity. One of the features on the new KBA 162 Rapida press is its fully-automated inking system, which measures the exact ink amount in each unit and captures every cost involved.
