Perspectives | Page 3 of 16 | Engineered Printing Solutions

This past weekend, the Manchester Machine Makers, a local high school robotics team headed north to Hinesburg, VT, for the Vermont First Tech Challenge Championship competition. Weeks of preparation paid off. The team played six matches, and impressed the judges mightily with their skills, knowledge, and character. They brought home not one, not two, but three judged awards this year. They earned the Design Award, and were first runner up in both the Think Award and the Control Award.

Isaac Vernon was recognized as one of two Finalists from the State of Vermont for the Dean’s List.

In addition, Isaac Vernon, a third-year member of the team and the son of an EPS employee, was recognized as one of two Finalists from the State of Vermont for the Dean’s List, a prestigious award for students who are dedicated to FIRST’s principles and show leadership and sportsmanship.

You can read more about the teams success this past weekend on their blog: https://manchestermachinemakers.org/2022/03/20/2021-2022-post-competition-update/

You can also read about Isaac’s award here: https://manchestermachinemakers.org/2022/03/20/isaac-vernon-honored-as-a-deans-list-award-finalist/

Manchester Machine Makers, the 4H robotics club sponsored by EPS, is geared up for the Vermont State Championship this weekend at Champlain Valley Union High School.

Manchester Machine Makers Headed To State Championship Their robot, Freya, the Freight Frenzy Robot, is ready to go.

The challenge this year is called “Freight Frenzy” and focuses on the creation of robots that move freight. The robots will earn points for moving and sorting freight (yellow plastic cubes, rubber ducks, and wiffle balls) from a section of the field representing a warehouse to a three-tiered structure. They can earn extra points if they place a self-designed cap on the structure. The Manchester Machine Makers cap features an EPS logo on the very top.

Team members learned SolidWorks and were helped with design by EPS employees Randy Marsh and Larry Wood. The EPS Machinists custom-made a part that connects the freight arm to the main body of the robot.

Let’s wish them well at the competition! The event will be livestreamed at youtu.be/I57Glg0Ve1k.

To learn more about the club check out their website: www.manchestermachinemakers.org

To learn more about the competition and the freight frenzy challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6lX12idAf8

Manchester Machine Makers Headed To State Championship

Employee Spotlight: Ray Johnson, Pad Room In today’s Employee Spotlight, we visit with Ray Johnson, our pad room specialist. Ray designs and pours all of our custom pads for our customers.

Q: How long have you worked at Engineered Printing Solutions?

I have been with the company for over sixteen years.

Q: Wow, that’s a long time! What do you like best about working for EPS?

What I like about working at EPS is the people. I enjoy coming in and seeing my co-workers. We’re a dedicated bunch, each with different skillsets, but all pulling in the same direction.

Q: Tell us about a typical day. What do you do at EPS?

My day is pretty routine. All of the pads have basically three stages. I’m either making bases or pouring molds, or cleaning the pads.

Q: How many pads do you keep in inventory?

Our stock pads come in a multitude of different shapes, sizes, widths, lengths and heights, without even mentioning the custom pads we pour for our customers. If you originally ordered your pad from us, we’ll have noted the pad re-order number on the base. If you want to try one of our pads and see one on our website that matches what you’ve got, give us a call and we’ll talk.

Q: What is your turnaround time for orders?

Although we stock our most-frequently ordered pads, we generally pour your pad within hours of receiving your order. Then, depending on the pad material and the size of the order, we generally ship orders within 3-5 days of receiving them. One important factor, as I mentioned, is the pad material itself. Blue pads cure in 1 hour, red pads take 24 hours to fully harden, and white pads take a full 48 hours of curing time before we can pack and ship them.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your background. What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like to bowl, hang out with my family, and play with my dogs.

Thank you for your time!

EPS Welcomes Its Newest Hire: Blessing Ejeriefe! Engineered Printing Solutions welcomes its newest hire, Blessing Ejeriefe, as a Machine Assembly Specialist. Originally from Lagos, Nigeria, Blessing emigrated to the US fifteen years ago after his employer in Lagos sent him to New York City for training, and he hasn’t looked back since. His wife had ties to the Burlington area, which brought him to Vermont. The couple now lives in Arlington. Welcome, Blessing! Please let us know where we can find jollof rice in southern Vermont.

Want To Find Out More ABout Careers at EPS? Drop Us A Line!

inline flame pretreatment

This machine uses a six-axis robot to load parts onto the conveyor for printing. Stored “recipes” control everything from parts-handling to tooling changeovers.

Engineered Printing Solutions recently shipped one of the most versatile automated singlepass inkjet printers in its history, and the rapid development process was made possible by streamlined design and production techniques implemented in the past year. The machine in question was designed and built in our East Dorset facility for a leading player in the promotional products industry. Based on the XD-70 platform, this machine featured a six-axis robotic arm controlled by a vision system to load parts, inline flame pretreatement, a five-color, six-head print engine, and servo-controlled offload accumulators for sorting different SKUs.

Printed products are automatically sorted for downstream secondary activities.

With this machine, the customer will be able to store separate “recipes” for each SKU, each of which can be recalled instantly upon changeover.

Parts are first loaded into a fixture. Stored recipes enable the robotic arm to locate the part, pick it up and place it on a conveyor for pretreatment. The part then moves under the print heads for marking. Following inline UV curing, the part is conveyed to a series of “gates” that open and close according to the recipe. In this manner, parts are sorted automatically. On average, this machine can mark 1,000 parts per hour, including changeovers.

This singlepass inkjet printer will be able to accommodate up to 20 SKUs, and this is limited only by the number of end-of-arm tools stored in the carousel. With changeovers of the carousel itself, the number of SKUs this industrial inkjet printer can decorate is limited only by the 25-lb. weight limit of this particular arm and the physical dimensions of the part itself. In the hands of a skilled operator, this is the proverbial Swiss army knife of production decoration for the promotional products industry, able to accommodate a wide variety of parts, capable of performing near-instantaneous changeovers, and delivering products with complex decorative effects and subtle gradients at fourteen linear inches per second.

See This Automated Single Pass Inkjet Printer In Action

You can see this machine in operation here, including tooling changeover, pretreatment, and sorting:

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The Makers Welcome New Members

We have gotten to work on our robot! Here is what the team has been doing this Fall…

We have been cleaning out and organizing our new space donated by TPW Real Estate that we are sharing with two local First Lego League teams: the Fiery Froggies and the Explore team.
Also along with the new space we have welcomed some new members this fall (left to right): Amos, Jake, Zach, and Takoda. (see their full proﬁles on the Team page).

Read the latest updates from the Manchester Machine Makers

Read The Newsletter

East Dorset, October 18#&8212;Engineered Printing Solutions (EPS) donated $2,000 to the Manchester Machine Makers, a local robotics team, as part of its continuing support of the group. Isaac Vernon and Charlotte Ruley, both students at Burr & Burton Academy in Manchester, stopped by to receive a check and take a tour of our facility.

EPS’ Julie Glover presents a check to Isaac Vernon and Charlotte Ruley, president and vice president of the Manchester Machine Makers.

EPS has been supporting the team for several years now. In addition to financial support, EPS will conduct an engineering review of their robot, and EPS employee Randy Marsh will teach team members in the use of SolidWorks, a solid modeling computer-aided design and computer-aided engineering computer program. EPS will also provide support for software programming and fabrication of the robot, and is also hoping to offer an internship to one of the Makers next summer.

The team is a chartered 4-H Club by UVM Extension, and recruits team members in grades 7-12 from all schools in the Manchester area. They are always open to having new members join the team. Engineered Printing Solutions is proud to help develop the workforce of tomorrow. You can read more about the Manchester Machine Makers on their blog: https://manchestermachinemakers.org/blog/

When I tell people that Engineered Printing Solutions builds printing equipment, I usually see a look cross their face as they picture huge offset printing presses with enormous rolls of paper flying through them, like those scenes out of a movie from the golden era of Hollywood that end with a spinning newspaper boldly trumpeting a sensational headline. When I explain that we make printers that print on everything BUT paper, people usually get a confused look on their face. Then I point out the speedometer dial in their car, the branding and instructions on the front panel of their washing machine, or the logo of their favorite football team on the glass they are drinking out of, and I explain that what we specialize in is building “direct-to-object” printing equipment.

Wait, What Is “Direct-to-Object” Printing?

Golf ball printed on a Cylindrical Inkjet Printer

Direct-to-object printing is just what the term implies: printing branding or other decoration directly on three-dimensional objects—everything from drinkware to disc brake rotors to packaging for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG). More traditional methods of decorating usually focused on printing labels (or, more recently, heat-shrink sleeves in the case of many consumer packaged goods) which were then applied to the product.

Cell phone cover printed on a uv led curable flatbed inkjet printer.

Flat objects such as this cellphone cover present fewer challenges than more 3D shapes.

It should be noted that direct-to-object (DTO) printing is also sometimes referred to as “direct-to-shape” printing. Some people use the term “direct-to-shape” to refer specifically to objects or parts that must be rotated or moved in order to mark all sides of a 3D part, though most people use the terms “direct-to-object” and “direct-to-shape” interchangeably.

Benefits of Direct-to-Object Printing

Direct-to-object printing has several advantages over traditional methods of product-decoration. First and foremost is the elimination of the need to maintain a sufficient inventory of labels (usually printed by a third-party vendor) to prevent production bottlenecks. The addition of labelling machines and label inventories typically requires a greater factory-floor footprint than DTO methods of part-decoration.

By eliminating the dependency on a third-party label supplier, brand owners can rapidly prototype designs, resulting in faster time-to-market for products. Indeed, the rapid changeovers that direct-to-object industrial inkjet printers facilitate not only result in fast prototyping, but they also make extremely short runs economically viable. This opens up a world of possibilities for personalization of products, including versioning and customizing for seasonal and regional variation. Direct-to-object inkjet printers also allow manufacturers to maintain leaner inventories of their products themselves, as they can maintain inventories of semi-finished goods, marking and decorating them “just-in-time” in response to fluctuations in demand along regional or seasonal lines. Leaner inventories also mean less waste of scrap product and unsold inventory.

Finally, direct-to-object industrial inkjet printers such as the ones we build tend to be more environmentally friendly than other methods of product-decoration. Because our direct-to-object printers use solvent-free UV inks and drop-on-demand technology, only enough ink is jetted to mark the part, resulting in very little wasted ink. UV-LED lamps instantly cure the ink to the part, providing durable decoration free from migration and resistant to scratching, peeling, or flaking. Further, the elimination of printing plates and extensive make-ready at the beginning of print runs also contributes to overall savings.

Challenges of Direct-To-Object Printing

Direct-to-Object Printing Equipment: It’s What We Do!

Parts such as this hard hat present a greater challenge, but this helmet was printed on a single pass inkjet printer built by EPS. We have built several hard hat printing solutions over the years.

Direct-to-object printing is not without its challenges, particularly with single pass inkjet printers. Inherently, jetting all the ink necessary in a single pass—hence the name—to create complex designs with subtle gradients and photorealistic imagery on a three-dimensional object moving through space introduces unique challenges. These include, but are not limited to, wind turbulence generated by the movement of the part, the necessity for consistent transport and precise drop placement accuracy.

While the usual solution to this problem is to place the print heads as close to the part as possible (ideally no more than 10mm), most industrial parts have topographical relief in excess of that. At line speeds up to 50 inches per second and higher, ink chemistry and the physical properties of the ink, such as viscosity and shear, must be known and precisely calibrated. For proper adhesion to occur, the surface tension of the substrate must be less than the surface energy of the ink, and to achieve this inline plasma pretreatment is often necessary.

Where a white base layer is applied prior to other colors, UV-LED lamps must instantly “pin” the white ink so that the colors laid down on top do not blend with it. Finally, dedicated software must take into account the precise topography of the part to be printed in order to subtly alter the 2D image to conform to the 3D part and avoid distortion.

More Information on Direct-To-Object Printing

Want to learn more about DTO printing? Download a free copy of our White Paper DIRECT-TO-OBJECT DIGITAL DECORATION: Practical Considerations to find out more.

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