Ake Larsson and Lawrence Sullivan established the business in a Stockholm garage back in 1957. They started by adding plastic inserts to key-rings and fobs. When they relocated from Stockholm to Motala in 1965 the two founders expanded their production capabilities to include direct printing on plastic using a screen-printing press and the first offset press for this purpose in the whole of Europe.

In 1980 Inplastor was acquired by an investment group and in 1991 taken over by the Graphium group.

In 1993 ID card manufacturer ID Kort, based in Strängnäs, joined the group. The paper-printing division was spun off and the group renamed XPonCard. Today Inplastor is a 100 per cent subsidiary of the XPonCard group, which has since gone public. The Stockholm-based group makes every kind of card imaginable for markets in northern Europe and the Baltic, while its SIM cards for mobile phones are sold all over the world.

In the course of time the group expanded its plastic-printing capabilities and the range of applications it could support, first and foremost for product promotion, in order to address the highly specialised and widely diverse demands of a client base that embraces banks, mobile operators, ID specialists, public authorities and retail chains. Within the XPonCard group Inplastor’s Strängnäs plant, with 20-plus employees, specialises in bank cards while the Motala operation, with some 90 staff, prints other cards plus non-card products such as point-of-sale materials, utility items and informational literature.

While most plastic printing plants can only print one or two of the most common types of plastic, Inplastor has amassed in-depth experience in direct printing on 15 different types of synthetic substrate including linoleum.

The company is continuously developing new product lines by combining screen and/or offset printing(which includes reverse printing on transparent materials) with embossing, die-cutting, vacuum forming, laminating, gluing, welding and other finishing techniques.

Brain-storming sessions with clients and XPonCard designers give rise to some extraordinary ideas that can be implemented with much greater flexibility and more cost-effectively now that the offset department has received reinforcements in the form of the two KBA-Metronic presses.

Before the five-colour Genius 52 UV was put into two-shift operation last November in the Strängnäs sheetfed offset department, all the presses there were conventional. The five-colour version installed in Motala in June is the first of its kind worldwide to feature a coater and a lengthy delivery extension. It joined a Mitsubishi UV press that has been running waterless since 1998. Prior to pressing the button on the two Genius presses, Inplastor’s total annual output came to just short of 85 million card and non-card products. These included 15 million cards in Strängnäs alone. In 2004 XPonCard doubled the volume of SIM cards it could produce.

The Genius 52 UV embodies the very cutting edge of technology – waterless and keyless offset, UV inks and optional UV coating – all for a modest capital outlay. The addition of a coater, especially, enables the press to deliver a level of gloss that allows the company to dispense with the need for the mirror gloss of offline laminating, which is much less cost-effective. And environmental considerations play a not insignificant role: keyless inking units eliminate the need for fount solution, and this is a major sales argument in favour of ISO-14000 accredited enterprises like Inplastor.

But the main reason for choosing this feature was that it supports problem-free printing on as wide a range of synthetic substrates as possible. “We wanted to be able to print even more plastic cards cost-effectively than had previously been the case, but even after tests extending over a period of twelve months, none of the conventional sheetfed offset presses from the manufacturers we contacted was capable of working to our specifications,” explains Inplastor managing director Hakan Kindström. “Then at the Messe Cartes in Paris we saw the prototype of a Genius 52 UV with coater. Its capabilities and ease of operation were just what we were looking for.” Kindström decided to install a straightforward five-colour version at the Strängnäs plant at the earliest opportunity and his preferred configuration, with coater and long delivery extension to allow the coating to spread uniformly prior to UV curing, in Motala at a later date.

With such an expensive type of substrate the smaller format (360 x 520mm or 14” x 20½”) is certainly no drawback, while the low waste rate (a maximum of ten sheets) and optimum use of the sheet size help to keep costs down.

Nevertheless, Inplastor is maintaining its screen printing capabilities, both for coating prior to lamination and for printing with highly pigmented special-effect inks.

This would indicate that the Genius 52 UV may well prove to be an attractive proposition for silk-screen printers who are looking for new lines of business and already have experience in UV print production. Or, indeed, for advertising agencies wishing to build up their own production facilities for promotional materials. In any case, the Genius 52 UV satisfies the market demand for shorter turnaround times, smaller print runs and cost savings for these customers as well. Inline coating saves offline lamination

Since keyless inking units are easy to operate, the press is custom-made for users with no experience in offset printing. Waterless UV offset guarantees a consistent and exactly repeatable printing quality and most economical use of expensive printing substrates. The press crew can learn how to operate the press in a very short time and produce high-grade photographic-quality prints with a maximum start-up waste of ten sheets.

Waterless UV offset does not require special pre-press features. Inplastor uses standard software like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign or QuarkXPress, and imaging is done with a computer-to-film system. The layout is transferred to Toray waterless plates in a copying frame. There are of course also suitable computer-to-plate solutions available, from thermal imaging units to plate processors. Waterless plates have the added advantage that the photo emulsion – unlike in many wet offset plates – does not have to be burnt in for resistance to UV inks or radiation.

Within Inplastor’s manufacturing sequence for bank cards, the Genius 52 UV installed at Strängnäs is scheduled for printing on multi-up plastic foil sheets with UV inks.

The front and back foils are then laminated on the rigid plastic substrate. In further separate steps, the cards are finished by UV coating, stripe application, stamped holograms, embossing, die-cutting etc. Bank card production cannot dispense with these expensive offline finishing procedures. However, many other card and non-card products do not require offline lamination and other finishing steps typical for bank cards. This means, first and foremost, that these products do not need laminating; the plastic substrates of different thicknesses are directly printed on and coated inline. In addition, many products only need face printing, ie the pile goes through the press only once. Separate finishing mainly includes sealing, gluing, die-cutting and similar procedures.

That is why the Genius 52 UV installed in Motala, with coater unit and delivery extension, is the most efficient solution imaginable. Although the Metronic OC200 can print and coat in one run, it can only handle single cards – also with pre-formed cavities for chip application. In contrast, the Genius 52 UV coater press is suitable for larger sizes up to 360 x 520mm or multi-up jobs.

It handles printing substrates up to 0.5mm thick (0.8mm optional) which is sufficient for most plastic and composite foils or metallised materials. And the high gloss of the inline UV coating applied by the Genius 52 UV can certainly stand comparison with an offline coating. The Genius 52’s UV coater, which made its debut in the Inplastor press, is a squeeze coater with duct and metering roller for applying thick coats, suitable for both solid and spot coatings. The coating line, which is approximately six metres long and has an integrated infrared dryer, ends in a twin UV dryer just in front of the delivery pile. The coating unit itself features an intermediate UV dryer to cure the ink immediately prior to coating. Suction belts safely transport the sheets from the coater to the delivery.

Examples of Inplastor's products:

Card applications: banking (credit, debit, cheque) cards, telephony (SIM cards), identification (staff passes, admission control), public transport (season tickets), retailing (loyalty cards) etc

Non-card applications: in-store promotions/point-of-sale marketing (pads and display units for shop counters; hangers, wobblers, show cards and pointing fingers for shelves and freezers), stickers, pennants and flags, water- and weatherproof promotional literature, globe, calculation discs (cost calculators, pregnancy calendars), instruction leaflets (safety instructions for aircraft, checklists), washable menus, colour specimen books for the automotive industry, welding goggles (automatically darkening 3M SpeedGlass), pocket and desktop calendars, garlic cards (card-format garlic grater), ice scrapers etc

Subjectively influenced ink feed via ink keys was yesterday. Today, and in the future, standardised keyless inking and repeatable top-level printing quality is the winning game – an innovation by KBA-Metronic and KBA, tried and tested in practice many times over. The four-roller inking unit for waterless offset with UV-curing inks was first used in the Metronic OC100/OC200 card printing press. Today, it is the core technology in Metronic’s Genius 52 UV, CD-Print and Premius presses. In the Genius 52 UV, four (optionally five) inking units are positioned like satellites around a central impression cylinder, which makes for a minimum of mechanical effort, an ultra-compact footprint and optimum registration. Metronic’s parent company, Koenig & Bauer, employs the keyless inking unit with oxidative inks in its Genius 52, 74 Karat and Rapida 74 G (here the inking unit goes under the name Gravuflow), while a modified version (Newsflow) for penetrating inks is used in the Cortina newspaper press.
The inking process in the four-roller unit is as easy as 1-2-3-4:

1st roller: a ceramic-coated anilox roller scoops up an adequate volume of ink, precisely limited by a chambered doctor blade.
2nd roller: the grooves in the anilox roller are emptied directly on the ink-forme roller.
3rd roller: ink splitting transfers the ink onto the plate cylinder, or more exactly onto the image areas of the waterless printing plate.
4th roller: finally, the ink is transferred from the plate cylinder to the fourth “roller”, the blanket cylinder. The temperature of the anilox roller and plate cylinder is carefully controlled to ensure that ink viscosity remains within the optimum range.

www.inplastor.se

www.edstroem.com

www.kba-metronic.com