Harper Passes Blind Quality Control Study

Published: November 17, 2005, By pffc-online.com

PRESS RELEASE

CHARLOTTE, NC—Harper Corp. of America has completed a blind quality control study where its operations in Charlotte, NC, Green Bay, WI, and Bangkok, Thailand, received and filled fictitious anilox roll orders without the awareness of manufacturing equipment.

“This testing program, which included a total of nine anilox rolls, was developed to verify Harper’s digital cell volume manufacturing systems globally, therefore validating the systems all the way to press,” said Ron Harper, CEO of Harper Corp. The test involved the manufacturing and testing of three 10-inch Mark Andy rolls, with screen counts of 400, 600, and 800 lines, and 60-degree hexagonal Platinum surface engravings. The anilox volumes included Echotopography Digital Volume (EDV) measuring 3.7, 2.5 and 1.8 BCM (billion cubic microns), respectively.

Only after manufacturing was complete on the Platinum® laser-engraved rolls did each manufacturing location receive the shipping destination—Harper’s Charlotte corporate facility. Once the rolls arrived, there were no additional inspections made before the in-press test. The anilox rolls were taken to the Flexographic Trade School and run one after the other, in sequence by line screen. Again, testing was blind until the final density results were obtained. The ink color run for density testing was cyan, with inks provided by Environmental Inks Inc. During the press run, no special effort was made to match color between rolls, but rather to focus on obtaining good, equalized impression.

Density results for the 400-line, 3.7 BCM anilox rolls were 2.06, 2.09, and 2.1, indicating a total variation range of 1.9%. For the 600-line anilox rolls, density results were 2.03, 2.06, and 2.08, or a variation range of 2.4%. Densities for the 800-line anilox rolls were 1.95, 1.96, and 2.0, resulting in a variation range of 2.5%.

For more information, see harperimage.com.