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quality control  printing - flexo 
Asian flexo printers are really lifting the quality of their work, warns Rod Urquhart. In November I had the most pleasant experience of presenting a talk on the activities of the CRC and the National printing Laboratory to the Asian Flexographic Technical Association conference in Bangkok, having done a similar presentation to the Australian FTA conference in October.

The principal reason for the invitation to Thailand was that along with colleagues (and friends) Bob James, principal printing trainer of the Melbourne College of Printing and more latterly of RMIT, and well-known industry identity, Alf Carrigan, chair of the Australian National Print Awards, I had been part of the judging panel of both the Asian Flexographic Awards and the Asian Print Awards. The judging had been done in Singapore a couple of weeks before, and the judges had been hugely impressed by the quality of the section winning entries.

It is a clear endorsement of the value of the various printing awards competitions that the quality of entries across the board is increasing as printers become aware of the levels of excellence that must be attained to produce work of world standard.

As Alf said in his introduction to the awards presentation ceremony, “What is the quickest way to impress a customer? ... Show your printing award”! Indeed, one printer in the Asian awards competition showed his marketing prowess by using a picture of his award from the previous year to lead his self-promotional calendar.

The “best in show” award for flexographic printing was won by a Bangkok based printer of flexible food packaging, TPN FlexPak (a member of the Thung Hua Sinn Printing Group), with a superb example of a processed chicken pack on polypropylene. It later transpired that TPN had previously won a number of printing awards in the UK, USA, and Australia.

TPN’s likeable, energetic, and extremely articulate executive director, Chairat Usavangkul, invited the visiting judges and Asian FTA officials to visit his factory the morning after the award ceremony, and so off we went in a TPN people mover to see how flexography was done in what we thought was a bastion of gravure printing.

During the conference, the point had been raised that although printing in Asia was growing annually by a few per cent, and that gravure was on a similar growth pattern, flexography was growing (albeit from a small base) at a truly remarkable 24 per cent per year.

We were soon to see why. The TPN FlexPak factory is of a stunning modern and attractive style of architecture (as the Melbourne Federation Square should have been), situated on a nine hectare site, giving heaps of room for expansion, and the first hint that we received of the standards of the operation was on entering the foyer we saw that the award from the previous night was already encased in a glass display cabinet. Staff had worked overnight to put their award in a place of pride - this was obviously no run of the mill operation.

Following a formal presentation on the scope and capabilities of the plant in a purpose built theatre, we were taken to the entry to the printing area to be clothed in sterile clothing and head covering, then taken through a clean room decontamination/extraction booth as used in electronics and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants before being allowed to enter the print room.

First impressions of the plant were of its size (cavernous), and its cleanliness (which would rival the most elite hospital kitchen), the towering Fischer & Krecke eight and ten colour 16 S Flexpress CI machines (as clean as new), and the sterile protective clothing of the printers and plant staff (superb attention to hygiene).

The ink room with its dispenser and neatly arranged drums of concentrate and varnishes did a very long time inkie’s heart good, as having seen many, many ink rooms of all conceivable levels of housekeeping, this one’s spotlessness could have served as a model for the rest of the industry – anywhere.

Adjacent to the pressroom and through a double curtained walkway, a state of the art Windmoeller & Hoelscher film-blowing unit, accurate to 0.1 micron, was churning out flexible film at 350kg per hour. A significant point was that none of the visitors could detect the slightest smell of burned plastic that usually accompanies such large installations.

Print to be laminated went to a Windmoeller & Hoelscher Varicoater LF solventless laminating machine, with which TPN has developed a retortable pack that has found acceptance in the highly critical US and EU markets. In fact, TPN has had major successes with export of packaging to several major North American and European food processing and packaging companies.

The TPN plant also boasts an array of Macs to do prepress, digital platemaking, a sophisticated digital proofing system and full-size proofing machine, auto plate register, high speed converting machinery, over 200 staff, and an outstanding R&D and quality control laboratory.

But why do I tell you all this? For many years there has been an ‘understanding’ that Asia was the home of gravure, and that no printer there could undertake work that was in smaller numbers than millions of impressions. Further, that the overall quality of print from Asia was somehow inferior.

From the description of TPN FlexPak you can perhaps understand why the visiting judges - with well over a hundred years of collective experience – were blown away by one of the finest plants we had ever seen.

The reality is that the technology of the current best flexo printing rivals anything that the other processes can produce, and as pointed out by Chairat in an address to the AFTA conference, particularly with small type, the flexo image is significantly superior to gravure as the cell pattern of gravure dominates, whilst the flexo image is so sharp as to be essentially indistinguishable from litho.

And it must be borne in mind that TPN FlexPak is not the only flexo printer in Asia. With 24 per cent per annum growth, flexography in Asia is indeed a process to be reckoned with, and with printing of the finest international quality standards from the latest technology, coupled to the flexibility and cost structure of the flexographic process, those who read this should be aware that printing from the new Asia is no longer something that can be treated with the slightest complacency – it is, after all, right on our doorstep.