Press Maintenance

[dschell]

We are in the process of updating our Press Maintenance schedules & SOP's. Your feedback to the following would be appreciated.

1) How often do you change rollers on your press's?

2) What is your criteria for changing a roller?

3) How many rollers do you keep on hand? (we have 4 and 5 color presses)

4) Are you aware of any resources that may be helpful in our effort to update our SOP's?​

Thanks

 

[Meny]

is it all about rollers ?

I would change rollers once they are no good for me.
A good roller that has a good life (but no work) can hold for years , but when the rubber is hard , it will not work as well , even if it hardly printed and looks good.
A bad roller ( yes , some are bad) could be worn out in 6 months.
Do you treat your rollers well ?
If you do , you may need less changes over the years , but if you do not... who know's...
So you see , your question is very hard to answer...

What about oil change ? gripper service ? ink duct service ? filter change ? feeder head cleaning (air deviders) ? and lot's more...

It is not all about rollers.....

Go figure...

 

[dschell]

No not at all, it is not all about the rollers, only one aspect but there have been some questions on the number of rollers being used per year. Do you keep one full set, that is enough for one color unit, of rollers on hand? More? Less?

 

[FSA]

dschell
I have set-up a few shop in how & when to maintaine presses. You have a 4&5 colour presses, if they are both the same you should have four sets of forms, two sets of everything else, the your cover for those rough days that demand quality. A good practice is to aways check the form roller setting on the last wash-up of the week and adjust, it only takes a few minutes. Every six month the rollers should be pulled out and checked for bad bearing and clean the ends to prevent spitting. It's a good idea to keep a log book of what has been done to each machine. If your running 24hours a good thing is to get one of the shifts to do the daily grease, be the day, afternoon or nightshift but that gets done everyday, too many operators are alergic to the grease gun. The same goes for your water tank, and it's needs. A couple of hours every week can keep the machine in great running order, and print with less problems.
FSA

 

[dschell]

FSA

Thanks for your response. We do have regularly scheduled maintenance which is performed on all presses weekly, monthly etc. I like the idea of having them check the form roller settings on the last wash up of the week, not sure that is being done currently.

I have someone checking on the "money" we are spending on rollers which is why I started exploring this subject. We change out on average 4 rollers per month, that is an average and there are months when none are changed and then months when we might change out 6 or 7, you get the idea. We are running two shifts five days a week. Two presses, a five color and a two color.

Does that sound like an excessive amount of rollers to go through each month? Or in other words does that fall within an acceptable range for the usage?

Dan

 

[FSA]

dschell
That seems like alot of rollers for the number of print units in your shop. The red and blue print units will aways need more than the black and yellow, one thing that I have done to keep the bean counter happy is take the ok rollers from the red and blue and put them in the black or yellow or duster because those colours will still print very good with a good used roller. Where the red and blue are always needing new rollers to make them print back to par, roller rotation, there out anyways when checking the bearing.
Question are your machines running alcohol , that would change everything. I can get up to four years out of the inkers and a good year and a half on the red metering and two to three years on the other metering. No harsh washes lots of water on wash-up and check the nips weekly, thats on a two shifts a day plus O.T. on weekends. The one press turned a whopping 800 million impressions and was still going, I think it went to china to finish it's life.
FSA