Artgrafix Blog

The cold weather is upon us and here in Connecticut it has been cold the past couple of weeks.  When the weather turns colder, the static electricity seems to increase many fold, making controlling dirt and keeping film from wrinkling more challenging.  We do clean up every day, but this time of year that is not enough especially with some of our adhesive coated products.

One of the products we sell is adhesive coated plexiglas and the adhesive we use is an optically clear adhesive.  That adhesive has a polyester liner which seems to generate more static charge.  That plus the adhesive is very thin to help the clarity and can be difficult to process.   Running this would be the same as over-laminating films with a gloss laminate film.

To control this we have taken the following steps:

• We wet down the floor before we begin to coat plexiglas.
• We wipe down the idler bars and feed in tables with the cloths you use in a dryer with your clothes.
• We control the release liner and make sure it is removed closer to the nip (we make sure the liner is taken off after the film comes in contact with the main roller).  This adds more rigidity to the film as it is applied and it has less chance to wrinkle.

These steps have helped a lot but still sometimes this can be a difficult.  Anybody who has other thoughts on how they manage this through the winter would be welcome.  Thanks.

For the type of laminating we do, a sled is used often.  A sled is a non-stick rigid surface which supports a print and laminate film as it is processed through a laminator.  Common sleds are made from silicon paper-faced foam boards and specialty materials such as formica. Our goal is to make sleds more durable, easier to ship and use to make pouch laminating and single-sided laminating easier.

What we are looking at includes:

1.  Foam board has the issue of forming to the size of the print being laminated creating an outline which can them subsequently be embossed into larger pieces that are laminated with the same sled.  Materials such as Formica are up to 3 times more expensive than foam boards.  We are looking at alternatives such as mat boards, paper boards and other harder materials.  We are still laminating these materials with silicon papers to have a non-stick but more durable board.

2.  Regardless of the sled material, the print and laminate is usually held in place by taping the edge which will be inserted first into the laminator.  Making sure the leading edge is smooth is critical to preventing wrinkles and can be difficult because many tapes do not adhere to the non-stick surfaces.  Also, if you wrap the tape to the back of the sled, the tape can tear the back of the board and make it not last too long.  We are experimenting with creating a flap over the leading edge of the sled such that a user could slide their print and laminate under the flap and when it is inserted into the nip of the laminator, the pressure would hold everything in place smoothly.

3.  Finally, sleds are expensive to ship.  They are larger thank the prints being laminated and usually are the width of the laminator and twice as long as the width.  Also, one sled should be good to last for 25 to 50 uses.  What happens is that people need to buy a half dozen at a time to last several months.  But the cost to ship 6 foamboards is often more than the value of the boards and becuase they are fragile, companies such as UPS can damage these easily.  We are looking at rollable materials which can be shipped easily.

Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome.

Hi and welcome to our Company blog. our purpose in starting this is to create an informal communication with you and those involved in print display. Artgrafix is a company which focuses on servicing people just starting out mounting and laminating larger prints. Our view on mounting and laminating is while it shouldn’t be hard to do, it’s not always obvious what to do and finding out how can be frustrating. We hope this blog is a tool to help us understand what is important as well as a resource to get you information you need.

To give a little structure to our blog (and only a little), we will write a short recap each month on the following items:

• New product ideas we are working on
• Industry trends which have effected us
• Problems we incurred and how we’ve addressed them

By way of background, we ventured out and started our business over 6 years ago and had many of the ‘near death’ experiences new businesses endure. While I believe the axiom ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ has some truth, I could have lived with things going closer to plan. Needless to say, we have learned a lot in the past 6 years.

We are a typical small business. We have a 7,000 square foot warehouse in a not so pretty industrial park. But it’s clean, functional and serves our purposes well without breaking the bank and is convenient and safe for our 11 great employees. Everyone here has touched our products in tangible ways. From coating and cutting boards, everyone has played a vital production role in times of rush orders or covered when folks are out sick. And everyone has an opinion from what they hear customers say on new laminate films and products. Our customers can talk to anyone here and all of our employees can take an order. We are not big on Job Description (although we have some), but it all comes down to quality and service and everyone here knows that.

We hope you like spending a couple of minute a month seeing what we are working on and if you desire, add your comments for us to learn from. Thanks again!