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Screen Printing History - Part 1
The development of the first bottle printer by Autoroll Machine Corporation
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"As An Entrepreneur You Succeed or Fail for Reasons You Can Never Anticipate"
The Curious History of Screen Printing on Plastic Bottles in the US
Ben Adner: Hi, this is Ben Adner of Inkcups Now. I am very pleased to introduce Bill Karlyn, the founder of Autoroll Machine Corporation - one of the primary innovators in the screen printing industry. He developed many of techniques found in all machines used today. Autoroll is the company that started building screen printing machines for printing on bottles, became the market leader in the decorated bottle, printed circuit, semiconductor and compact disk marketplace.
Bill, let's talk about screen printing machines and a little bit about your history.
Bill Karlyn: Well, in 1957 I started a little company that manufactured industrial adhesive. I was looking for packaging for samples and discovered that plastic bottles were just being introduced. So I bought some plastic bottles and put my glue and plastic bottles with paper labels on them and distributed them and found that the paper labels fell of or wrinkled when the bottles were squeezed.
One of the first bottle printers in the US
(Click image to expand)
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I had learned that Monsanto, one of the pioneers in developing plastic bottles was experimenting with direct screen printing on the surface on polyethylene bottles, so I began to do the same thing. I learned quickly how to make screens and developed some devices that enabled me to direct print on the surface of plastic bottles with hand operated tools. I printed a quantity of samples, got them out into the marketplace and waited for people to call, hopefully to buy my adhesives. Instead I got calls from people wanting to know... where I got the bottles printed! I then followed up and determined that there was a latent market out there for printing on plastic bottles. No one in the area was doing it, no one had the technology and it looked like an interesting opportunity. I got some orders for bottle printing, built an air-operated semi-automatic printer and began running bottles down a conveyorized dryer with one employee. And in a matter of months I had a small decorating business successfully running. The only problem was that if the phone rang we had to shut down the production line because one of us had to answer the phone. In any event we continued to do a fair amount of short-run work and this all took place in the equivalent of a three car garage.
At one point a call came in from Sexton Can Company who produced seismic explosive cans. They wanted to know if we could print 15,000 cans a day. That was an amazing number in those days and we figured out a way to do it and began to generate some half decent revenue. Word began to spread that we were a go-to company for decorating on hard to print surfaces including plastic bottles.
One day I got a call from Owens Illinois in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The plant manager introduced himself, his name was Jack Connor. He told me that they were setting up a molding plant and were looking for a company to do contract printing for them. I asked them what type of volume that was involved and he said between 5 and 6 trailer loads of bottles a week. We couldn't get a trailer load in our building and so I went up and visited with Jack and sure enough, there was a huge plant under construction with a large number of molding machines. We agreed that in 60 days time I would be ready to handle significant volume. I rented 8,000 square feet of space in Salem, MA, built four production lines and we were ready when the Phisohex bottles began to ship. It took a couple of months to get the bugs out of the system but before long we learned that young women were excellent machine operators and that the work was suitable and we ended up with a fairly productive operation.
Ben: How did you build those screen printers? How did you put them together?
Bill: I went to a machine shop in Lynn, had the parts made and assembled them myself. By the time we moved to Salem, I had hired two or three mechanics and we all built the dryers that we needed ourselves. We found that we could make do. We worked very long hours and had lots of hurtles to get over but we were able to get the production out the door and satisfy one's own needs.
Ben: Was anyone else building screen printers at that time?
Bill: Not that I knew of. I believe that screen printers were being used in the glass industry. I think there was a company called Sola that built those types of machines but they weren't suitable for plastic bottle printing. A company came along in that general period named "Dependable" and they built a fairly rudimentary machine but it didn't have the bells and whistles that we were able to develop. We developed an air-dry system and an automated inflation system and we were able to patent features and they were very helpful.
As the decorating company grew we were forced to run it on a two shift basis and within a fairly short period of time, I would say within 2 years, had at least 50 people working at Autoroll. We named the company Autoroll because we automatically rolled print on plastic bottles.
There was a fair amount of pressure during those years to sell machines to potential customer. While I resisted it for a while, eventually I decided that it would make some sense. So we dressed up the machines made them quite attractive and commercial looking. We standardized them and began selling them in the open market place. I then determined that it would make sense to split the company and founded Autoroll Machine Corporation and changed the original name of the decorating company to Autoroll Decorative Products. The move was a wise one in hindsight because the decorating company functioned as an excellent sales tool, a wonderful beta site and an excellent facility for training new customers. We were also able to take any overruns or any capacity that our machine customers had, but couldn't fulfill, into our own company and support them that way. So the two companies offered an excellent package in the industry.
And as I say, it grew rapidly and huge orders began to materialize; Breck Shampoo came in with an order for 80,000 shampoo tubes a day, they wanted a trailer a day of a household chemical printed and Owens Illinois got into the toiletries and cosmetic field and they sent huge orders to us; one was for an underarm deodorant powder.
All of this was plastic packaging and it became evident to me that the next step was to develop automated systems and we developed the Autoroll A1, the first automated bottle printer ever built in the US. And we began printing some of these large volume rounds at fairly high speed; we were able to get up to 3000 bottles/hour versus 1000 bottles/hour on semi-automatic machines.
Ben: What was the biggest challenge when screen printing on bottles?
Bill: Well there were a number of challenges; one of the serious problems was surface treatment. Bottles had to be properly treated for the ink to adhere properly. We eventually developed automated flame treating systems that oxidized the surface of the plastic bottles and allowed ink to bond properly. Inks themselves were difficult to come by and working with ink companies we were able to come up with inks that were both flexible, glossy and bonded to flame treated polyethylene.
Another issue was static electricity. During the winter and during low humidity days an entire conveyor of wet bottles could become completely charged with static electricity and suddenly fly all over the place including knocking bottles down and destroying the print.
Another problem was "What do you do with rejects?" And we had all kinds of means for cleaning and re-treating and re-printing rejects. Those early days were pretty rough days and we were flying by the feet of our pants but we managed to evolve a fairly reliable process. And that's generally the story of how Autoroll Machine Corporation got its start.
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