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Screen Printing History - Part 3The first UV automated screen printing machines for bottles and compact disks in the US |
We took our revolutionary system to a packaging trade show and nobody paid attention. We got absolutely no interest whatsoever in the system. It was truly revolutionary and much before its time apparently. We then came back and built a two-color machine and the first one ever built, that I know of, in the world. I ran it with demonstrations in our plant and then took it to tradeshows and the same thing happen, no one paid attention. Five years later everybody in the industry was using UV curable inks on automatic bottle printers. Fortunately we decided not to chase the market because our UV technology really wasn't state of the art. Fusion Systems had developed a far better system and the industry went to Fusion Systems for their UV curing devices and we did too. At one point we were using 15 systems a month. So while we were there first with a revolutionary printing process, we didn't patent it and we didn't partake in the real rewards. Ben: Many years later, skipping ahead, you also developed specialty equipment for compact discs. Can you say a little about that equipment and that particular market? Sure. There is a little lead up to that. In 1977 I sold the company to Dennison Manufacturing Company, ran it for two or three years and then left. In 1985 I bought it back from them. They had pretty much destroyed it and by that time new technologies had come along and they hadn't kept pace with new developments. And so there was not much left of the company. It was struggling dearly and at the time loosing about a million dollars a year. I got it turned around, salvaged a pad printed product line and the bottle printed product line, developed a new automated bottle printer, which brought us back to the head of the pack. And then went looking for a new product for the company to build. I had an open mind but I had learned that Compact Discs were becoming popular; they were replacing floppy discs and there was a madscramble to develop automated systems for both molding the discs and printing the discs. I learned that the discs were being successfully printed with UV curable ink. They were compatible with the coating that was used on top of the metallized disc. It was a UV coating and so the bond worked quite nicely and I learned that Kamann and Dubuit had introduced machines that were nothing more than ceramic plate printers for printing compact discs. They were slow, they were very difficult to setup and they were inconvenient for operators in other ways. There was also a machine in the US, built in Japan, which was even more cumbersome than the two European machines. What I did was travel to many of the major molders of compact discs. Created a wish list for a printing machine and came back and re-designed or designed kind of a rotary table machine. We built a small wooden model to scale, took it back to the compact disc producers - Companies like RCA and Sony and Time Warner and Specialty Records and others, looking for someone to partner with us in the developing of the machine. None of the majors were interested. They said to come back when you have the machine. Then we found a small contract molder in Canada who was in the business of molding discs for the industry, who went along with us. He wanted the machines for next to nothing but was willing to give us some technical help and with him we developed a three color machine and a six color machine. We really strained the company dramatically. We weren't prepared for the development and construction of such complex and large machines and fought our way through the development of those first two machines and while we delivered late and upset the customer, the end results were excellent and the machines produced magnificently well and were a major leap forward in the technology. Word spread quickly and we began to build the machines in relatively decent volumes. By 1995 we were building 5 units a month - each machine or each system sold for $400,000-$900,000. And with the other things our company was doing, including an expanded consumable business, we had our sales volume up to about $40 million which in today's dollar is about $58 million. We had 150 employees and we were a very modern manufacturer using a lot of outside vendors to build subassemblies. And so it was quite a success story. Ben: That is really amazing! A finishing question: what do you see as the future of screen printing? Bill: Well, screen printing on 3 dimensional items has changed pretty dramatically. Most if the plastic bottles are now decorated with a pressure sensitive plastic label which are offset printed. Some decorate it with offset printed shrink labels or sleeves and a few are still screen decorated. I would think that somewhere down the line digital inkjet printing will make in-rows. I don't think there is a future for direct screen printing in plastic bottle decorating the way it used to be. That's probably the situation where modern technology probably is going to illuminate screen printing. Screen printing will still be used for flatbed application but digital printing is making in-rows there as well. As far as compact disc printing is concerned, I would guess that the future also lies in some sort of digital inkjet printing. Obviously it's not there yet but it has got to be the way to go because you can generate the artwork on computers, run your decorating lines directly from computers and have the capability of switching images on the fly which is pretty convenient. Ben: That's excellent. We've been talking with Bill Karlyn, founder of Autoroll Machine Corporation. Thank you very much for being with us today Bill! Bill: My pleasure! |
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