Hunkeler is a part of the postpress or finishing of many presses and so it was demonstrated at several stands and for a wide range of applications in conjunction with digital presses used for book, commercial and newspaper printing. In its own stand inHall 14 it showed several new products with the ability to automate themanufacture a huge variety of special products that incorporated high valuemailing and security solutions. In realisation of the increasing and already increased widths of digital presses,Hunkeler showed its new POPP7 generation of solutions for processing web widths to 660mm.

As digital presses become faster and wider they have to handle a greater amount of infeed tensioning and web turnovers as well as postpress operations of cutting, folding, collating, stitching and trimming. SeveralHunkeler partners showed the new POPP7modules at the show.Moreover, the HP stand showcased the first complete POPP7 line worldwide including unwinderUW7, cuttingmodule CS7-I and drum collator DC7. The finishing line alternately processed signatures for book production and a full-colour newspaper.

Like the correspondingmodel fromthe POPP6 generation the drumcollator DC7 is designed for web speeds of 150minutes a minute and has a capacity of two to twelve 4-sided sheets in broadsheet format (cross-fold).

AtHunkeler’s stand we saw the new Variweb producing mailers with formdie-cutting, perforations and a variety of very smart labels that included RFID antennas. The Variweb in-line modules can be combined for a huge number of paper processing operations, and are especially good for adding or inserting variable, security or othermachine-readable elements efficiently. A key component is the Variweb (universal module)UM520-Wwith the functions die cutting, perforating and cross cutting with variable chip-out. The integration of these functions in a singlemodule significantly increases the flexibility for the design of creativemailings or single-sheet mailers fromprinted webs economically. The independently driven web transport andmagnetic cylinder enables variable processes without tool change and very short changeover times.

On a second line Hunkeler demonstrated Variweb’s production of smart products smart labels, smart luggage tags,and smart tickets. Smart products are becoming increasingly significant in the context of product and personal identification based on RFID technology. For removing the
matrixHunkeler showed rewindmoduleMR 520-W that can also be used for rewinding finished smart products. The same system configuration can also be used for standard added-value products such as integrated labels or plasticised integrated cards.

Hunkeler demonstratedmany other operations that can be performed and that are desirable or necessary on amoving web of paper for efficient processing. Some of these such as variable overprinting or inspection are easy to understand while there aremany other operations that are not. Likemany others we need to spend a lot more time trying to understand material handling, in-line processing of printed webs, and finishing.We brought back samples of some of the smart products that can be created with printed and plasticised papers.