The concept of pad printing steel plate and the process characteristics

The use of pad printing steel plate in the pad printing process occupies a dominant position, 100% of the oil pan type pad printing machine and 16% of the oil cup pad printing machine use thick steel plate with a thickness of about 15mm; Another 77% of the oil cup pad printing machines use thin steel plates with a thickness of 0.25mm and 0.5mm, whether it is thin steel plate or thick steel plate, the plate-making process is the same. The substrate used is also about the same. The steel plate must have a fine microstructure and a sufficiently high surface finish. The former ensures the neatness of the edge of the corroded graphic and text, and then ensures the integrity of the dot structure, so that the sharpness of the trimming and color restoration of the printed graphic can be realized to the greatest extent; The latter guarantees a clean and print durability. The surface tolerance of the thick steel plate used on the oil cup pad printing machine is higher, and the surface tolerance is too large to accelerate the wear of the oil cup on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also related to the sealing of the ink.　　

The thin steel plate has better flexibility, so the cleanliness of the scraping is easy to guarantee, but this is related to the manufacturing accuracy of the substrate supporting the thin steel plate, and the surface tolerance of the substrate does not meet the requirements, and the ink will leak in the sliding process between the oil cup and the steel plate. Another factor is the manufacturing accuracy of the oil cup sliding guide shaft, such as surface roughness and fitting tolerance, which is reflected in the index of the assembly level of the whole machine, and how to control the parallelism tolerance between the guide shaft and the steel plate is very important. From this point of view, it is more difficult to manufacture thick steel plate oil cup pad printing machine.

Resin version

The resin plate has not been used in the pad printing process for a long time, but it has been taken seriously. The resin version is mainly nylon photosensitive glue, which is cast on the surface of the zinc plate, which is similar to the resin version used on the self-adhesive label. Nylon has very good abrasion resistance and can withstand repeated rubbing of oil cups or scrapers after light-sensitive curing. The advantage of using a resin plate is that it is easy to obtain extremely fine dots, and when printing beautiful small items, the resin plate is the first choice. If the manufacture of oil cup pad printing machine reflects the manufacturing level of an enterprise, then it will be more difficult to manufacture the pad printing machine using the resin version, nylon photosensitive adhesive belongs to polymer materials after all, when the substrate manufacturing accuracy supporting it is poor, it is not easy for the pad printing machine to complete the general printing. The surface state of the polymer material is very fine, and a slight defect will seriously affect the printing quality.

Plate-making process

At present, the production of pad printing steel plate is mainly based on the use of nitric acid solution and ferric chloride solution with protective agent for corrosion. The acid smell used for this corrosion is very unpleasant, and the generation of nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide is very harmful to the human body. Therefore, it has long been banned in European countries. They started making plates using resin or laser engraving. It should be a relatively novel idea to use the powder-free corrosion machine of the corroded zinc version to corrode the steel plate, and some manufacturers have successfully trial-produced, which greatly reduces environmental pollution. The resin plate making is much more environmentally friendly and safer. The resin version uses nylon photosensitive adhesive, which can be developed with sprinkled semen. With the advent of digitalization, it won't take long to digitally produce pad printing resin plates.