UK: Chambers and chucks prove their worth
DESIGN ENGINEERING specialist Delpro has developed new carbon fibre chambers for its doctor blade system that incorporates both unidirectional and cross-weave fibres.
Sandwiching unidirectional fibres within outer cross-weave layers provides the optimum combination, says the company. The cross weave fibres are more aesthetic and provide more integrity to the outer layers but the unidirectional fibres continue to provide the essential and consistent rigidity across the length of the cylinder where it is needed most.
Delpro claims to be the first company to introduce fully enclosed carbon fibre chamber doctor blade systems. Available in widths from 150mm to 3000mm they can be retrofitted to an existing press or as part of a new installation where they provide cleaner, faster running with a significant reduction in ink usage compared to open tray.
A tool-less blade and seal changeover ensures downtime and make-ready times are kept to a minimum and a simple, two-position mounting system automatically compensates for blade wear ensuring precision blade to roll position on every set-up.
Being corrosion free, applications include all solvent, water-based and UV cured inks, as well as specialist lacquer and adhesive coatings.
Bespoke chucks
Delpro also recently joined forces with Italian company Svecom brought together by Svecom’s UK agent Jarshire to help Delpro solve a demanding application that required a bespoke design for safety chucks and lightweight, but high-carrying capacity, air shafts.
Unusually, because of size restraints, the chuck drive needed to be mounted in-board of the main machine frame to significantly reduce the overall length of the chuck/drive mechanism. This required a completely new design to satisfy the exacting specification.
Delpro worked with Jarshire on previous projects and asked the company to work on a solution that required a high level of flexibility in the design process. In turn, Jarshire consulted with its Italian principal Svecom which, over the last 30 years, has been designing air shaft and chucks. With Svecom engineers happy to work closely with Delpro, a design was achieved to not only meet the exact application but also be competitively priced.
Due to the high shaft loadings and resulting manual handling issues, Jarshire advised that Svecom high strength, lightweight multi-bladdered, ledge row shafts would be required to carry the reels of material. The safety chucks chosen were of Svecom’s 925 series with sliding locking plates rather than a tilt ring to lock the shafts in. High-speed quality bearings were fitted to the chucks and the jaws of the chucks were of a round and a square design – thus eliminating end-float and chatter, whilst producing a quieter running chuck with far less wear on journals and chuck jaws. As both the safety chucks and shafts were coming from one supplier, it was also possible to machine both the jaws and shaft journals to take account of shaft deflection due to the heavy reel weight – this preventing the possibility of safety chuck jamming and operators having to use a hammer to open them.
With Delpro specifying and monitoring the design process to ensure successful integration into their specialist fabric splicing machine, the Svecom equipment has proved of great success and is seen as demonstrating the benefits of specialist collaboration.
DELPRO:
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