Astonishing Results on Metal Decorating
South Korea’s leading metal decorative printer, Daesung Metal Printing, is now using Trelleborg’s recently upgraded Vulcan Metal Deco blankets following ‘astonishing results on our toughest job.’
Daesung had been working closely with local Trelleborg distributor, Hwasung Major, while trialling an earlier version of Vulcan Metal Deco on its Mailander and Fuji Primex presses.
“Hwasung has had a good relationship with us for a very long time,” says Daesung factory manager Soon-Haeng Lee.
“Although Vulcan is widely acknowledged as the top quality blanket brand, the results had not been very satisfactory when we tested the product on our metal printing presses. We always obtained good screen dot reproduction, but ink transfer when printing solids was not positive.
“So we had some doubts when Hwasung initially asked us to trial the new Vulcan Metal Deco. However, after we listened to Hwasung’s explanation that this was the first dedicated metal decorating blanket on the market to incorporate a special compressible layer, designed to improve solid reproduction quality, we decided to test it.”
Daesung put Trelleborg’s blanket on its Fuji Primex press and printed one of its most difficult jobs, bottle caps for a popular vitamin drink.
“The key to this job is to generate sufficient ink over the whole plate while keeping the unprinted, reversed-out small text clear.
The result looked good at the beginning of the print run, but we soon encountered a slurring problem.
To avoid the unprinted text being smeared with surrounding ink, the press operators had to reduce ink coverage, meaning that they could not achieve a good density over the solid areas.
We also found that metal substrates were not released properly from the blanket and encountered problems of early plate wear and frequent blanket washing.”
Based on this detailed feedback from Daesung, Trelleborg redesigned the Vulcan Metal Deco product range and Hwasung requested another trial from the South Korean printer.
The blanket we had been using from another manufacturer to handle these bottle caps,” says Mr Lee. “
Not only did small reversed-out text remain extremely sharp, the solid areas of printing were very clear. All of the other problems we encountered during the first trial were also solved by this new version.
“However, in order to evaluate Vulcan Metal Deco even further, we used it to print the metal sheets that are formed into Nivea cream cans. This is our most complicated job and normally forces us to run the press at a much slower running speed. The job entails printing cyan on a white metal substrate. The lid and base are printed separately, but the ink density has to be the same and the latter contains tiny, reversed-out, text.
” Previously, printing metal sheets for the Nivea cans entailed several passes through the press in order to obtain clean white text (invariably requiring the operator to overprint and register white ink to the reversed-out letters) and good solids on the lid and base that were of the same density.
“Trelleborg’s upgraded Vulcan Metal Deco achieved astonishing results on our toughest job. As soon as we started using the redesigned blanket, we could see the tiny white letters clearly reversed, even when printing cyan at the volumes needed to obtain the same density on the lid and base. For the first time with this job we had perfect printing in one pass.
“Vulcan Metal Deco has solved the chronic production problem we had been faced with for such a long time. We now use Trelleborg’s new blanket on all of our presses running conventional ink. It is the blanket we have been looking forward to for more than 30 years,” says Mr Lee.
Daesung exports more than 40 per cent of the jobs it produces, with work going to customers throughout Europe, USA, Japan and New Zealand. Daesung produces the majority of South Korea’s quality colour metal decorative printing for baby milk powder cans, which demand high levels of cleanliness, and is also a major supplier to the food and drink industries.