Cliché Plate Wizard Tells All - Pad Printing Plate Making Secrets Revealed
Often we get the impression that some customers consider cliché-making or plate making a mysterious black magic. How else, they wonder, could anyone produce consistent results every time when so many variables are part of the formula? There must be some magic spell, some secret trick that those wizards in the ITW Trans Tech plate lab are keeping to themselves. Well, here is the secret: there is no secret. Each step in the process has been tested and controlled in making hundreds of thousands of cliché plates over thirty years. A good example is the procedure for adding a screen to the etched image on a plate. Unless each step in the process is controlled, the results may vary.
A customer who was recently having difficulty producing consistently good photo polymer plates; some were OK, some were scrap. After doing some detective work, we discovered that his old exposure unit had a short circuit. The bad wiring was dimming the light emitted by its UV tubes. Once he fixed the electrical problem, his plates started coming out good every time. He learned the importance of having a consistent, reliable process using quality materials. No magic was required.