Generally speaking, tubes printing mainly includes offset printing, flexo printing and screen printing, gravure printing, hot stamping and so on. Flexo printing is the mainstream trend of the future, but it is not yet fully popular, the main printing method of the current tube is still offset printing, offset printing is usually what we call relief printing, tube offset printing process is divided into: dust – surface pretreatment (corona treatment and flame treatment) – printing (UV ink) – glazing – UV curing (or heat curing).
“tube offset printing process”
The principle of offset printing is to transfer the ink to the printing plate through a set of ink rollers, and then the printing plate transfers the ink on the printing pattern to the rubber blanket, and then the rubber blanket transfers the complete printing pattern to the substrate at one time.
Offset printing has become the main printing method of tubes printing, mainly has the following advantages:
(1) Good printing effect
The tube offset printing process has the characteristics of letterpress and offset printing, and these two printing technologies are relatively mature.
(2) Multi-color printing
When printing tubes by offset printing, in addition to CMYK four colors, some spot colors are often used. At present, eight-color printing presses have appeared in the field of tube offset printing, and woolley’s six-color and eight-color offset presses have been relatively mature.
(3) Fast speed and high
production capacity
In the fully automatic tube production line, tube forming and printing happen in one go. Printing machine, extruder, injection head machine and foiling & capping machine into automatic tube production line, the production speed of the whole line can reach 100 pieces/minute.
(4) Low printing cost
Compared with screen printing, offset printing costs are relatively low. The reasons are as follows: first, the price of offset UV ink is cheaper than screen printing UV ink; Second, offset printing is an indirect printing method, the ink transfer from the plate to the surface of the tube needs to be transferred twice, so the ink film layer transferred to the surface of the hose is obviously thinner, and the amount of ink is much less than the screen printing method; It doesn’t bulge when you touch it with your hand. This is also one of the simple ways to distinguish offset and screen printing. Third, the speed of relief offset printing is fast and the production capacity is high, which reduces the printing cost of each tube.
(5) Stable quality and convenient detection
Automatic tube production line is equipped with automatic camera and automatic stripping device.
The whole printing process ensures that the printing quality of the tube is in a stable range.
