Under a veil of secrecy its engineers in Frankenthal have been working with their counterparts from Decopress Printing in the German town of Soest, to develop a gravure press for decorative printing.
After successful trials, KBA has publicly announced the new TR5D press which has taken two years to develop after the joint project agreement was signed at Drupa.
KBA’s deputy head of gravure Thomas Potzkai says the first challenge was accommodating the rigorous quality specifications for decorative printing.
“The water-based inks that are commonly used in this market, posed engineering challenges of a completely different nature from those of publication gravure.
“But thanks to the invaluable support of engineering staff at our pioneer customer Decopress, who displayed an awesome level of expertise spanning repro and formes manufacture through to machine construction, we created a press whose groundbreaking technology fitted the bill on every count.”
The gravure system’s reelstand with overhead belt pendulum has been modified to handle the high web tension necessary in decorative printing.
The overhead dryers for the four printing couples have been supercharged to enable them to dry water-based inks at exceptionally high speeds. The air flow in the convection dryers is heated by gas jets.
Modifications also included changing the covers on the impression rollers to accommodate the altered printing width in decorative printing.
KBA developed new impression rollers with convenient, quick-change sleeves that eliminate the need for time-consuming changes of complete rollers. The four forme cylinders change automatically – register-true coupling included – in less than six minutes.
Decopress provides an all-in print media service embracing pre-press, press and post-press. Most of the original artwork handled by the repro department is large format. The decorations are printed on special paper which is subsequently pressure-laminated onto wood-based composites such as chipboard for the manufacture of furniture, flooring or other interior design accessories.
