Precious  commodity

They are often large, they are sometimes very heavy, they are known to be expensive, and they are as easy to damage as they are hard to handle. Sheet materials. Increasingly a part of every sign and graphics manufacturers’ portfolio of staple consumables and a key component in the expanding range of application opportunities that presents itself to anyone with the imagination to see it, and the hardware needed to get it done.

Working with sheet materials invariably involves specialised hardware. Not every sign and graphics producer has it, whereas most have a printer of some description or a vinyl cutting plotter at minimum. Suitable premises need some thought too if rigid sheet materials figure in your life. A first floor studio with its only access being a door at ninety degrees to a narrow passage just will not work.

Storing sheet materials and dealing with the waste matter that their conversion produces also dictates that light industrial accommodation is needed. So does housing potential noisy machinery delicately sipping from a 63-amp electrical supply and creating local weather disruptions with powerful vacuum tables lowering air pressure.

All that said, vinyl lettering has to be adhered to something if it is not destined for a vehicle’s flanks or some other piece of existing structure. If it is not a banner or a fabricated signing structure, it is almost certain to be a piece of rigid material. How then does a modestly equipped sign and graphics producer deal with the material in question?

Measure and measure again

Once invested in the right tools for handling sheet materials, the good news is, those tools age a lot more gracefully than either plotters or printers. Not much fundamental, for example, has happened in the world of radial saws in the last twenty years whereas printers from that era are now primarily known through archaeological evidence. A well-made sheet material cutting tool pays back the investment it represents in untold terms beyond the financial every single time it is used.



Most sign-makers’ experiences on the way to becoming equipped to handle sheet materials will involve liberating a piece of material of the size needed for a job, from a much larger piece. This will sound familiar to many. Equal numbers will have rapidly moved on.

In getting a nice clean sheet from a larger one, it first has to be acknowledged that the edges defining the sheet as supplied are probably not going to be good enough for the finished job. They have, therefore, to be finished, or more likely, cut off.

First, we measure. Next, we measure again. Now we cut. Let us say we are dealing with a foam board. We use a hard edge, a steel rule for example, as stop or steady for our knife. The blade digs in and the cut begins. With a will of its own the blade steers away from the steel edge as our unconscious handedness guides it. We bring it back in line leaving a swell in the edge we are cutting. A second pass in the same cut line finds its way outside too.

Suddenly though, we are through the sheet and into the sacrificial backing. Where we have scored deeply enough, we may be able to snap the material. It took time, but, with just a little finishing, the job’s done.

Clearly, this custom and practice has no future and is invariably and very rapidly succeeded by another—a phone call and a conversation with a company such as KeenCut. KeenCut, as the brand ably conveys, is in the business of making machines that help its customers from all manner of industries, but sign-making in particular, tame sheet material cutting challenges.

Looking at what Keencut offers, it is evident that, if you are in the sign and graphics business and find yourself dealing with foam-centred boards, foamed PVC, fluted boards, or aluminium composites among many other sheet materials, then there is room in your life for one of the company’s Steeltrak systems.



The Steeltrak converts big sheets you probably cannot use into smaller sheets and blanks that you definitely can. It does so quickly, safely, absolutely consistently, and with unerring accuracy. If you are struggling with scroll saws and hand-held knives on a daily basis, the relief that Keen Cut’s brilliantly engineered Steeltrak system can deliver from day one is almost beyond estimate. It saves untold time. It saves money. It will give your output quality a real lift too.

Above all though is the sheer utility of the system. Someone has put intent and purpose behind its design, someone with real engineering skills and a masterful grasp of ergonomics. That makes the system durable. It makes it beyond easy to use too. Instead of finishing a day fatigued and with a quantity of rejects, you get the same work done in a fraction of the time and without error.


 
Enter print

In the print-centric environment operated by most sign and graphics producers these days, a sheet material, or a part of a sheet, is likely to be a pre-cursor component of a printed sign. Some such signs will be printed direct upon the sheet, others will be laminated with printed self-adhesive film.

Laminating printed film to rigid sheets is another activity polarised around those materials that can and do consume many hours. It is an involved and error prone process that is better undertaken with a tool designed to do the job well. One such tool that has revolutionised the lives of people dealing with sheet materials is the Rolls Roller.



In essence, the Rolls Roller casts itself as a flatbed laminator. That does not begin though to hint at the importance of its talents if you are dealing with sheet materials.

Laminating printed materials to sheet stocks is a job that takes two pairs of hands at least if it is tackled manually, and will occasionally need the intervention of more when it does not quite go to plan. The Rolls Roller takes only one of those pairs of hands to operate and gets the same job done faster, much more reliably and with better results.

Thermoplastic sheet materials, like acrylic, ABS, and polycarbonate are relatively easy to cut into abstract-shaped profiles but are just about as flat as they come in repose. Any attempt at bending cut out shapes into forms more useful than the flat state will be met with the shape fracturing where stress concentrations are found, inside corners for example, or the work just springing back into the flat shape. To retain the bent or deformed shape desired involves heating the material so as to make it ‘bendable’, holding the shape until the heat is lost from the plastic and then admiring the finished result.

Getting localised heat into thermoplastic sheets is something you could struggle to do with a flame source, or accomplish very easily and repeatedly with a brilliant tool known in and around the industry as a ‘line bender’.

A line bender is a device that has a number of movable heating elements that are dimensioned in relation to the thickness of the material the user intends bending. In use, the element heats a line locally into the material being handled such that it can then be easily bent by hand. Once the heat dissipates, the shape or angle that has been introduced will be held.



With a supply of clear acrylic, a means to cut it, and a line bender on side, you are in the fabricated PoS business. At the most elementary level, something like a leaflet holder is quick and easy to make. Get more imaginative though and all sorts of bent and glued structures are possible. Picture frames, retail fixtures and fittings, sign structures, and the list goes on.

You can track down a line bender, and other very interesting off-piste tools for dealing with sheet materials at Carmarthenshire-based CR Clarke and Company. It will be an interesting chat. The company has been around since the 70s and is a bit of a gem because it revolves around an engineering star. Consequently, its products are those of a school that values durability and quality. You are likely to be using the very same piece of hardware twenty years or more after you have bought it.

Make it shine

One other product that is likely to interest heavy users of sheet plastics and that is available from CR Clarke is known as the Diamond Edge Polisher. This is one of those ‘does what it says on the tin’ products.

Put it this way, the difference between the edge you can accomplish with one of these machines, and the same edge that you have chased through manual methods, is literally hours and hours and untold rejects. What it does is simple, it puts a mirror-like finish on a raw, sawn edge. It does that in one operation. The how is interesting too. It swings a massive, diamond-edged tool that shaves mass off the edge of what is being worked.

The Diamond Edge Polisher can turn a chunk of thick, clear acrylic into a desirable object worth three times its cost or more in a matter of a minute or less.

No discussion involving polishing sheet plastics is complete without visiting the subject of flame polishing. Flame polishing will put a lovely glassy edge on the right grade of acrylic, but totally wreck the wrong type of plastic—take care. Take care too if your first excursion into flame polishing is in any way connected with a paying job—it is a skill and it has to be learned. Here is how it works.

Flame polishing hardware generates flammable gasses which are burned when expelled through a very fine nozzle at the end of the hand-held apparatus you use to do the polishing job. It is as simple as running the white-hot flame over the edge you are polishing and it is as difficult as that too. The difference between getting that lovely glassy edge and a charred, bubbling mess is down to experience. Get it right though and you are rewarded.

Sheet materials have evolved to recognise that most obliging flat surfaces these days are going to end up with print on them. If it is not in the form of a laminated sheet of self-adhesive material, it is going to be ink, almost certainly delivered by a flatbed UV printer.

Very specialised printing systems exist for printing direct-to-glass with equally specialised ink. These systems do the job described and no more than that. Narrowly talented they might be, but in terms of output value, we are in the stratosphere. Such systems find a home in equally specialist companies.

Coming back to earth for a moment though, print hardware capable of printing on rigid materials is now in widespread use and represents a compelling career progression for anyone routinely handling such materials. Advantages include the labour saving in not having to laminate self-adhesive material. Downsides include being denied the very corners of the quality envelope available more widely in the inkjet hardware market, though that is a moving target.

Broadly, printers suitable for imaging sheet materials direct fall into two camps. There are those that do the job by transporting the material on a belt-like arrangement under a static beam, often referred to as a hybrid. Then there are printers that move a beam over a larger static bed, those are pure flatbeds.

One fundamental decision any-one needs to consider is whether they need white ink available. Conventional wisdom says that you do. Printing process colour images on anything that is not white, apart from a very limited range of artistic applications, a non-starter. White ink printed as a first layer means that coloured images can then be printed on coloured sheets.

Hybrid printers can handle big rolls of   flexible materials in a more adept fashion than most pure flatbed hardware. Flatbed hardware can handle more in the way of challenging flat stocks. If you fancy your chances printing on doors, ceiling tiles, or other such exotic substrates, it is likely you will be turning to a flatbed.

One of the tools you will probably turn to when looking for a printer is something that calculates the return on investment you can expect. These look at life through a very strongly tinted pair of rose coloured glasses though that is not to say what you are seeing is not the truth. It may serve well to remember though that this cash generating machine and the ROI it delivers has an alter-ego; it is a monster that just eats money if you do not or cannot keep shovelling work into it.

Lesson over. The good news is, with a flatbed printer from one of the major players, and a supply of basic sheet materials, you have a set-up that can add simply enormous value to a piece of what was once a borderline commodity material.

Dig a little deeper still though and there is yet more value to be found. Digital cutters have evolved out of genetics that gave the world what was once discussed as the ‘flatbed plotter’. Those systems were, until the computerised graphics markets came along, working hard in drawing offices and in other places where an appetite for plotted paper has long since vanished. They comprise a table of varying size and straddling it a beam upon which is mounted the means to carry a bewildering variety of tools.

The basic set of talents to be found in most of the systems that have evolved into digital, or ‘dieless’, cutters are of profound use and value to anyone who prints things on sheets of flat material. They have knives, creasing tools, and some can be fitted with small spindles that give them a basic routing capability. Vision systems are a fundamental component of such systems and are used to simplify what would otherwise be an extremely expensive semi-automated process, or an equally expensive and error-prone manual one.

There has always been a need to cut around imaged designs to create abstract-shaped output. That is what digital cutters do. Instead of making a tool out of lengths of formed knife blades, the outlines needed are digitised and then indexed to the printed matter on the bed by using the camera to acquire registration marks. The cutter then gets stuck in with whatever tool is needed and cuts around the shape with greater speed and accuracy than any other process or craft can match.

One of the most established legacies in flatbed cutting devices traces to Zund. Zund offers products engineered to impressively high standards and focused on cutting applications across a range of industries. Its G3 system is richly equipped to deal with the needs of those involved in print finishing.



Flatbed digital cutters, Zund particularly so, are endlessly configurable and extendable to suit the diverse needs of the customers who buy them. Options such as conveyer beds and robotic material handling may have a confined audience, but serve the needs of those who want to automate production fully.

Enter the big guns

Though versatile in their outlook, digital cutters have to maintain a realistic outlook when it comes to machining or routing heavier materials. It is at that point where dedicated routing hardware takes the stage.

AXYZ, Tekcel, and an increasingly populous field of as yet unproven brands originating in the Far East are to be found on the field of play with newer entrants such as Protek getting a lot of attention from the market.

AXYZ machinery typifies the make-up of a typical dedicated router. There needs of course to be a spindle with sufficient power to push a cutter through very resistant materials, a means to extract prodigious amounts of waste, a bed capable of holding the material during processing, and a suitable controller for handling the job of getting the input data process and covered to output. In satisfying that need, AXYZ fields a large number of configurations targeted at meeting customer needs.

Among those meeting the need for production routing systems, Tekcel and Protek are to be found. Both these popular manufacturers are represented in the UK by Complete CNC Solutions. Protek’s production router is known as the Unico CNC. This system is basically a production routing platform capable of being configured with a variety of performance enhancing options including a flatness sensor, a camera, and a knife option.



Given the diverse range of output forms that sheet materials ultimately assume, the likelihood of a single system being able to cover them all was always seen as remote. Recently though, a system from Protek
has challenged that position. Now, according to those who know the systems well, the Protek Unico TT belongs on the shopping list of anyone who’s looking for either a dedicated router or a digital cutter. The Protek Unico TT is adept in either role.

There is a lot to tick in the basic appeal box when the Unico TT is concerned. For a start, it is said to generate output that is ready to use, not ready to finish. It is capable of producing the sort of edges that stand comparison with those yielding by dedicated polishing hardware.

For such an accomplished digital cutter, the Unico TT is an undeniably talented router too. It can square up to routing production tasks and power through work that typical digital cutters would call out of bounds.

Users of sheet material for sign and graphics production are well served by a range of hardware that defines a whole industry dedicated to making dealing with sheet a faster and easier job. It all serves the creation of a bigger market.

O Factoid: A flat sheet of rigid material 3mm thick is  rarely flat, or 3mm thick. Most sheet materials vary in thickness. O

Thanks to the inventive powers of its manufacturers, sheet materials can now be effortlessly cut, shaped, printed, and bent to more purposes than has ever been possible.
 
All this latent potential is there to be unlocked. The right material. The right hardware. There is more to sign production than print alone might suggest.



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