Finishing & Screen Printing

LasX Europe aims to spearhead a digital finishing revolution

Thursday 28. May 2015 - LasX Europe has been set up in Hannover, Germany, to support the EMEA region with sales and support facilities for the US parent company's range of advanced laser cutting and finishing systems. A network of agents is now being established throughout the region.

The public debut of LasX Europe will be at DScoop Europe, the HP Indigo user group’s meeting in Dublin on 3 – 5 June (see separate press release for more details). A Spider STS-400 robotic stacker will be demonstrated stacking cartons that have been pre-printed on an HP Indigo 30000 B2 digital carton press, and pre-cut by a LaserSharp B2 Motion cutter.
Dirk Stünkel is managing director of LasX Europe. “As short run and personalised printing becomes ever more attractive to clients, digital finishing has been the missing link to make the whole workflow truly responsive,” he says. “LasX has pioneered fully automatic laser cutters coupled with robotic materials handling, which uniquely can all be controlled by reading barcodes on the printed materials.”
LasX has manufactured high performance laser cutting systems in the USA since it was first set up in 1998. Its range of LaserSharp laser cutters have a wide choice of configurations, from roll feeding for narrow web labels and flexo finishing, though to sheet fed systems for commercial printing and carton packaging from 50 cm (B2 formats) up to 2 metre widths. There are also LaserSharp systems dedicated to electronics and medical work.
There is a choice of laser power levels from 100W to 2,500W, and multiple laser heads can be fitted to increase the cutting width. They can cut, crease, score, etch and ablate materials depending on the intensity setting, so almost any finishing process can be carried out. The transport belt runs at up to 60 metres per minute, with a vacuum that ensures that sheets and cut items remain firmly in place throughout the process.
“We can run inline with printing presses or nearline,” says Mr Stünkel. “We also work with partner companies to integrate with, for example, digitally addressed creasing systems that operate before the material reaches the laser unit.”
Its latest development is an optical recognition system that reads barcodes and positioning marks on the printed material and uses this to precisely align both the laser heads and the optional inline Spider STS-400 robotic stacker. The Spider can automatically pick up, sort, rotate, stack, shingle, and/or collate variable nested parts at high speed. For wider configurations two stackers can be fitted side by side.
The Hannover office incorporates a showroom for demonstrations of equipment and also has a parts warehouse for fast response to service calls. Installations and servicing will be handled by engineers based in Hannover, aided by remote diagnostics on every machine.
“We have already appointed CMD Insight as our UK distributor and we are working to recruit more throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa,” says Mr Stünkel.