Echaar Equipments launched two machines at the Plastindia 2023 exhibition – a stack flexo and a flexo plate mounting machine. The company also sealed a deal with Ahmedabad-based flexible packaging printer and convertor Flexure Print N Pack which ordered its first CI flexo press from Echaar. The company also bought the plate mounting machine that was being displayed at Echaar’s stand at Plastindia 2023. The fully loaded India-made 8-color Flexosmart HR300 gearless CI flexo press with speeds up to 300-meter-per-minute will be commissioned at Flexure’s Gujarat plant in March this year.
Well known for its CI flexo press, Echaar’s Kirti Panchal explained why Echaar decided to display a stack flexo press at the Plastindia event. Panchal said, “We are trying to demonstrate what a gearless stack flexo can do. Flexo – irrespective of CI and stack – has certain advantages over gravure. When you go for CI flexo, there is a cost impact. But when you go with a gearless stack flexo, it is equally good with certain types of substrates/materials. A gearless stack flexo has great capability of delivering unmatched quality on 50-micron LDPE, polyester, BOPP, paper, woven sacs, and more. That is what we are trying to highlight at the event. We are getting a very good response and visitors are delighted to see half-tone jobs being printed on stack flexo.”
Echaar’s plate mounting machine displayed at Plastindia is an ingenious innovation in the field of plate mounting, Panchal said. “In flexo, plate mounting plays a vital role. We are presenting a fully automatic plate mounter that can position a plate in less than 10 microns so that you get a very good mounting and registration. The machine also has a scanner that scans the complete sleeve, measures the resister mark and its coordinates, and measures the topography of the complete sleeve before sending the data directly to the machine so that the machine while printing can auto-register and auto-pressure. This technology is similar to the GPS technology being offered by European manufacturers.”
Speaking about the market, Ramesh Panchal of Echaar Equipments said, “The market is encouraging and things have shaped up positively in the last six months. More people are inquiring about CI flexo compared to gravure and are eager to know about the comparisons of CI flexo with gravure. The good thing is that a lot of awareness has been generated in the market today about CI flexo. Existing CI flexo users are successfully delivering great results to their clients – in short, the market is moving towards CI flexo.”
