Step 7: The die-cutting machine
This series of articles, titled “How to make a beverage coaster,” sees us answer the following question: How are beverage coasters actually made? Once our printing press is done printing the images we need on the sheets, our die-cutting machine takes care of cutting out the individual beverage coasters we want from those very same sheets.
State-of-the-art die-cutting technology delivers unrivaled production quality
Our new site in Willstätt started operations in the summer of 2024. And just like our printing press, the die-cutting machine is a key element of our production operations and is integrated into a fully automatic upstream and downstream logistics system.
The machine is 16 meters long, four meters tall, and reflects the latest in technology. But before it starts running, we carefully select and set up the die we want and then do a short test run. Once we verify that everything’s OK, we begin with series production, and it’s quite a sight to see: The machine draws in the printed sheets at impressive speeds, aligns them perfectly, and cuts out the shapes our customer wants with utmost precision. And to make sure everything keeps running in tip-top shape and every single detail lives up to our demanding standards, we conduct quality control checks on a regular basis.
Our die-cutting machine can process a maximum of 7500 sheets per hour at a maximum rate of 125 sheets per minute, and every single movement is perfection incarnate. During this process, a sophisticated monitoring system monitors the condition of these sheets in real time. The end result of this production step? Beverage coasters in stacks that are then transported on a conveyor belt for packaging.
As for waste, press offcuts are collected, pressed into 400-kg bales, and then sent back to our board production teams in Weisenbach so that these bales can be fed into the pulper as raw material. In fact, we don’t even let the dust from cutting wood pulp board go to waste, and have an extraction system that sucks up the dust produced by the die-cutter and presses it into small briquettes that are also used as raw material for board production.
If you missed station 6 of the article series “How to make a beverage coaster”, click here. To start at Station 1, click here.
