Craftech in Silverwater, NSW, has become the first Australian wide format printer to install the new Océ ProCut digital cutting system.
Running in tandem with an Océ Arizona 250 GT flatbed printer and an Océ CS9250 wide format roll printer, the cutting system streamlines the company’s large format workflow – from prepress to finishing – of rigid and flexible display graphics media requiring cutting.
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Des Mason with a job cut on the Océ ProCut |
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The Océ ProCut in action |
Craftech Managing Director Des Mason, says the company does a lot of profiling and die cut work though and soon realised they could save money on many jobs by doing them in-house.
“With any die-cutting job you have to balance the cost of outsourcing it, which can be quite high on a large run, versus doing it in house, which can be time-consuming,” Mason says.
“The Océ ProCut L2500 comes into its own here, saving hours of work while remaining remarkably simple in concept. You prepare your artwork just one-up with your cutting lines in a separate layer and download to the ProCut software, advising how many copies you want and the size and thickness of your substrate. It then calculates the best way to impose the job and steps the art into an imposition ready for the RIP.“
Each job is outputted with guide dots for the machine to follow using optical registration and a bar code so that it can always match the job with its archived cutting instructions. Prior to cutting the operator merely scans the bar code which then identifies the job and retrieves the cut instructions from memory.
The ProCut software then outputs complete job instructions to the flatbed printer, where it is printed off as required and then returned as one large piece of substrate ready to be cut. The cutting is performed by a series of knives operating on a cutting head. If it’s a complex cut, the machine can also determine how it can be nested to get the optimum cut from each sheet of substrate. Material costs are reduced by eliminating job re-runs due to human error.
The system significantly reduces labour costs compared to manual cutting because only one operator is required to run the highly productive automated cutter.
“It’s also a great time-saver even for a simple square cut jobs, saving us from doing the job by hand,” says Mason
“You can use it for a simple prototype, where the customer simply wants to see what the job will look like, to very large jobs, even running it overnight for jobs on roll paper as it automatically pulls the roll through each time it has cut what’s on the table. We also have an Océ CS9250 roll printer so, for jobs such as vinyl decals, we can cut hundreds in an evening.”
Des Mason says he prefers it to die-cutting as the cutting knives bend the edges of the substrate and can often give a rough-edged cut.
“The Océ ProCut gives a smooth cut throughout, whether we’re using hard or soft foam board, plastic material, acrylic and styrene, or flexible media including paper, film, vinyl and fabric. We can programme it to kiss cut, crease, V-cut, through-cut and most other types of common cut.
“In the printing trade everything is about convenience and speed. This expands our options exponentially not only in die-cutting but in straight cutting too, by vastly improving quality, reducing labour and increasing the speed of output.
“I’ve never believed in cutting corners but, in this case, we were happy to make an exception,” Mason says.
Océ Australia
www.oce.com.au
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