Product of the Week

For manufacturers of guillotine flow line equipment, the question of jogging has been an insoluble problem for years. Not that it can't be done - the global graphic arts industry boasts thousands of joggers sitting alongside guillotines, aerating and neatening reams of paper ready for cutting, It's just that until fairly recently it's been impossible to automate.

It’s a difficult, intricate process, and the easy way to do it has always been to use human hands, explains Roger Cartwright, finishing sales director at Manroland GB, the UK agent for flow line manufacturer Baumann. But obviously with rising labour costs and bigger sheet sizes, coupled with the problems of health and safety in guillotine work, in recent years it’s become more urgent to find an automated solution.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, automated jogging has been known as the last stepping-stone in the automation of the guillotine flow line. Everything else, you can automate fairly easily, says Cartwright, and it was only the question of lifting reams that remained problematic. His statement is borne out by the range of flow line kit currently on the market – plenty of jogger unloaders take the reams securely from the jogger and into the guillotine, but very few joggers have loaders.

The main problem with automated jogging is friction. If printed sheets are going to jog smoothly into a neat stack, friction has to be minimised. But by the time a pallet of work gets to the guillotine, it’s often stuck together by static, or even by ink residue.

As layers of paper are lifted into the jogger, a human operator will manipulate them – roll them, flick and ripple them – in such a way as to free the sheets so they can slide against each other, and the jogger can then knock the ream up ready for cutting. Simple though the actions are when carried out by a pair of hands, duplicating them with fast, robust mechanics has proved a significant challenge to the world’s best brains in materials handling.

Baumann launched the BASA automated jogger at Drupa 2004. The heart of the automation lies in a pair of rollers that take the layer of paper from the pallet and feed the edge between them while running at different speeds; this effectively fans out the paper and detaches the individual sheets from each other. This simple invention replicates the action of a guillotine operator’s hands and wrists, and forms the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle of automatic guillotine operation. There is, of course, more to it than that – each application and environment in which the BASA is used is bespoke, and the unit is the subject of several pending patents – but essentially the differential speed of the rollers is the foundation of the BASA.

Materials handling
The BASA’s operation begins when the operator tells the machine what count of sheets is required for each layer to build up the ream in the jogger. This can be either an approximate count (for example, five layers of 2cm each to form a ream of 10cm) or it can be an accurately counted amount (such as five layers of 100 sheets to form a 500 sheet ream). The different methods are applicable to different applications – label printers must have an accurate count prior to cutting, where a commercial application’s count accuracy at cut stage isn’t as important.

A knife separator enters the rear side, raising the corner of the layer away from the rest of the stack, and pulling in a high-speed mechanical counter to count the sheets and release any excess. The knife travels to the front of the stack and a series of sequential separating fingers lift the complete length along the front side. Grippers then take the front edge and pull the layer into the rollers that create a ‘bubble’ between the sheets while the air-blowers blow in an adjustable volume of air. After passing through the rollers, the layer is released onto the jogging table, and the process is repeated until a complete ream is built up.

The BASA can be dedicated to a guillotine or it can form an independent jogging line, processing work for several cutting lines. It also has a manual mode of operation, which effectively decouples the layer handling/feeding mechanisms and leaves an operator free to use the BASA as a standard jogger: operators might choose to use this mode where sheets were stuck together with ink rather than static, or where stacks were untidily formed.

Baumann has been making materials handling equipment to fit around guillotines since the 1960s, but it’s only really since the late 1970s that the Swiss manufacturer’s range of pile hoists, joggers, restackers and palletisers has become acknowledged as one of the world’s broadest. Market share, says Cartwright, is hard to quote, because as well as manufacturing a range of standard systems, Baumann also incorporates standard units into bespoke systems. However, he does say there are 60 BASAs in daily use globally, and Baumann has a proven installation base in 700x1,000mm, 1,000x1,400mm and 1,220x1,640mm, while the others are still at test stage in Size 3. Baumann is currently building its biggest BASA yet, at 1,500x2,050mm.

Options for the BASA cater for specialist applications such as labels and unusual substrates. The most popular options are an interleave feeder, which puts a single sheet of board between counted reams, and a sheet counter – again useful for label printers. Another option is a right-hand sidelay in the jogger itself – this is of typical use for work-and-turn jobs where print has been registered to the other side of the sheet.

Cost-in-use savings
Although on paper the BASA looks an expensive option, it has to be remembered that not only does it eliminate the need for an operator, it also (in a typical flow line) replaces two separate flow line units. A standard flow line around a guillotine might typically comprise a pile hoist, a jogger, the guillotine itself and an auto-unloader/restacker; the BASA replaces the pile hoist and jogger, meaning there’s an instant capital saving to consider as well as the cost-in-use savings.

The savings are considerable and the increase in guillotine productivity is impressive. A typical guillotine operator might spend 70% of his time on the jogger, and just 10% of his time actually cutting, says Cartwright. With a BASA installed, all that 70% is instantly converted into cutting time, because there’s no handling work at all.

In a factory with just one guillotine of B1 or above, Manroland’s calculations show that installing a BASA can reduce guillotine operation times by a third – or, put differently, one shift out of three. Alternatively, where the factory has more than one guillotine, the BASA can eliminate a guillotine. Which makes the payback period very immediate, points out Cartwright. And as you go up through the B1-plus sizes, the efficiencies created by the BASA get even greater, because the time the operator would take to handle such enormous sheets becomes longer and longer.

He is careful, however, to stress that the BASA has to be installed in the right environment to have any chance of paying its way. One guillotine in a single-shift scenario isn’t going to achieve a financial return on investment because the reductions in processing time simply wouldn’t create enough efficiency to lend themselves to payback within any realistic timescale.

SPECIFICATION
Max sheet size 1,525x2,050mm
Min sheet size 430x610mm
Max ream height 150mm
Max pallet stack height 1,800mm
Paper grammage range 60-300gsm (possibly heavier, subject to testing)
Price from £200,000
Contact Manroland GB 020 8648 7090 www.weareprint.co.uk

THE ALTERNATIVES

Schneider Senator Roboload
Schneider Senator’s solution to the auto-jogging question is a robot – effectively a giant orange arm mounted on a platform. The Roboload separates the stack at one corner, picks up the ream in a diagonal holder, aerates it and deposits it onto the jogger table. Three Roboloads are available in different sheet sizes; the largest matches the size of the largest BASA.
Maximum sheet size 1,600 x 2,100mm
Minimum sheet size 520 x 720mm
Maximum ream height not supplied
Maximum pallet stack height not supplied
Paper grammage range 80 – 300gsm
Price tba
Contact Friedheim International 01442 206100 www.friedheim.co.uk

Heidelberg Polar Autojog
The Autojog, or AJ-T, is a new Polar development that can be configured inline with a guillotine for almost entirely operator-free cutting, or offline with Transomat transport units for independent operation. Like the Baumann, it has a counter embedded into the pick-up process for precise sheet counting, and a two-roller system fans out the sheets. An air removal device then improves the alignment and formation of layers in the ream. Available for B1 and B0 sizes only.
Maximum sheet size 1,000 x 1,450mm
Minimum sheet size not supplied
Maximum ream height not supplied
Maximum pallet stack height not supplied
Paper grammage range not supplied
Price not supplied
Contact Heidelberg UK 020 8490 350 www.heidelberg.com