Aftermarket form rollers

Does anyone know if there is an aftermarket solution for oscillating form rollers for the QMDI?
What is a pressman to do about hickeys, other than all of the common sense ones?
I have operated both QMDI as well as Ryobi 3404 both have the same issue with hickeys. I do not use the plate cleaning or hickey remover feature for removing hickeys...I stop the press and use my finger or cotton cloth with alcohol and either pick away or wipe the plate clean. If you use the presses automatic feature to clean hickeys, you have about 3 uses before you see signs of plate wear and hairline scratches begin to show. The plates seem to scratch more often when cleaning with heavy coverages. The cloth is picking up the debris and dragging it along the entire length of the plate, rendering your plate unusable.
I like to use a blast of air during each cut of my stock and always back-trim and of course...keep my press clean!

Thanks,

Tracy

 

I agree with you on cleaning the hickeys by hand. I used to call the hickey cleaning mode, the "plate scratching mode" as what ever the hickey was on your plate typically would scratch it if you used the hickey mode to clean it off.

One of the factors concerning hickeys I ran into was from the 3rd form roller. Typically the roller was barely touching the distributor roller as it was not striped correctly to the distributor first and then to the plate. As a result it would not clean up properly and start to collect excess silicone, dried ink and paper trash. You really would be amazed how many times this was the main result of hickeys.

Another factor is the general cleanliness of the machine and shop. Any digital imaging press needs to be spotless. They require a much higher degree of maintenance in regards to being kept clean than a conventional press as there is no dampening system to help remove plate trash. This is the single largest problem I ran into with hickeys and scratches. These machines require a near hospital environment if you want to run as problem free as possible. Anything less and you will have issues with 10% to 20% of the jobs you run depending on how bad the environment is.

In our demo room where we used to show these machines we rarely ever experienced scratches or hickeys, but I can assure you after every job the machine was thoroughly cleaned and wiped down from cover to cover. A full clean up including bearers, hand cleaning the blankets and impression cylinder as well as the inside of all of the covers along with a wipe down of the outside of the press. We also cleaned the entire blanket wash device. (In a production environment you only have to do a complete clean up after every felt change.) This clean up regiment used to take me about an hour and 30 minutes each day. Even doing this, 1 out of 20 jobs would get a scratch in it due to some piece of dust floating around beyond our control.

Most people will say they do not have that much time to clean up the press each day because they have jobs to run. Although I always find it interesting they seem to have twice as much time trying to re-image due to scratches. Plenty of time to hand clean plates because they did not take care of the plate cleaners by running them out of cloth and letting the foam rubber drag on the plate consequently damaging it. (This happens most when operators try to save a few bucks by not changing the cleaning cloth when it says it is out and resetting the counter to get a few clean ups, inevitably an operator forgets and runs the cloth completely down.) As well as time to hand wash the blankets because they only dumped the solvent out and slapped in a new felt instead of completely cleaning the automatic blanket washer tray and all parts during a felt change.

The shops that followed all of these procedures by far had the least amount of issues with hickeys and scratches.

 

Paul, very good info on press cleanliness.