Printing equipment making NPE debut

There no doubt will be many more new printing and decorating systems introduced during the NPE2009 trade show in Chicago this June, but at press time we’d only heard from a few of the exhibitors of this type of equipment.

One of the market leaders, Pad Print Machinery of Vermont (Booth N75020 at the show), plans to debut its new KP line of pad printers with the KP-08, which replaces the XP-08 mid-size pad printer. The KP-08 prints between one and five colors with 90 mm ink cups, or can be configured as a one- or two-color machine with 130 mm cups. The KP-08 can be customized with a linear or elliptical conveyor, a rotary table, or to print 360 degrees.  Standard on all pad printers from the company are fixture tables for precision printing, hermetically sealed ceramic ring ink cups for quick color and art changes, and touchpad controls that allow simple programming changes.

Also new and debuting at NPE will be the TH 8130 8-color hybrid machine for printing of flexible tubes. Developed and marketed by Isimat GmbH (Booth N62040), the machine features both flexo-printing and screen-printing stations, with the stations interchangeable. The first TH 8130 will be delivered to an English tube manufacturer in October. The new RS 5480 is a five-color servo-based, screen-printing machine for printing onto cosmetic jars of oval, triangular, and square shapes. The first RS 5480 will be delivered to a North American customer in May. These advances in decoration of cosmetic packaging, especially jars and flexible plastic tubes, will be new to the North American market, reports the company. —[email protected]