Weyerhaeuser’s Flexo Printing Facilities Streamline Plate Mounting

Tighter plate registration

The Leader Vision system is so tight on its registration that Weyerhaeuser has uncovered tolerance aberrations in its printing plates that it did not realize existed while using its prior manual plate mounting method.

“We are working with plates that are 50˝ x 80˝ in size, large sheets of material,” says Matthews. “It is not unreasonable to think that there was going to be some tolerance variations in the plate making process. The plate makers can introduce variation in the way the plates are made. The timing of the exposure, the timing of the washout, the timing between the washout and the drying, etc., if these sequences vary at all in the plate manufacturing process, then one plate will be longer or shorter then the other. These variations affect the registration on press, which are not always evident in traditional mounting systems. The Leader equipment showed up the aberrations immediately, and allowed us to compensate for the deviations accordingly. It really brought it to our attention how much unknown variance was occurring on our prior system.”