22 June / July 2023 - Issue 247 www.signlink.co.uk UNDER THE HOOD / SUMMA F SERIES There are times when a printer does not know what order is likely to come through the door next, and our clients or their designers seem to come up with the most wonderful ideas, sometimes without much thought into how they can be produced. That is fine and we need to push the boundaries as this fuels development, but at some point, some poor soul may have to actually turn the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional product. Printing on a wide range of substrates is now considered straightforward. Lithographic, inkjet, or digital equipment can produce a wide gamut of colours with relative ease. The issue develops when it needs to be brought into life or practical use, be this cut, machined, or creased for folding. The larger question here is how do you actually buy all the equipment needed for these tasks? This is easily answered by Summa with its F Series flatbed finishing system. Headquartered in Belgium, Summa is recognised for its high-quality vinyl cutters, finishing flatbeds, and laser cutters all of which have been developed over a number of years and installed worldwide. The manufacturer’s equipment provides companies in the printing, sign-making, textile, industrial, and packaging industries with the most innovative cutting solutions. The F Series of flatbed finishing systems is one with significant flexibility, choice of size, and ability to upgrade via a large bank of options. Foundations in Size Setting out to purchase one of the five variants available from Summa is made easy thanks to well laid out product literature with the information presented through a step-by-step process. This enables customers to easily compile a basic specification and then add options to scope out the machine to directly match your wide range of finishing options. The first piece of advice from Summa is to consider the size of the cutting system you need as this can directly focus you on the correct base machine. Consider your work and from there you choose either the F1612 (the machine with the smallest of finishing tables) with a working area of 160 x 120cm or for longer work, you could consider the F1432 or F1832 with working areas of 136 x 320cm and 184 x 320cm respectively. Finally, should your work need to go right out to 3.2m with Cutting Without Limits ▲ The F1612 (the machine with the smallest of finishing tables) has a working area of 160 x 120cm Summa has in its F Series of flatbed finishing systems a range of options from the size of the machine to the number of cutting heads and finishing tools, catering for almost any substrate. Brian Sims finds out more F3220 or the largest machine the F3232 you get working areas of 327 x 210cm or 327 x 320cm to easily cope with large-format production. Tooling Up Next Once you have arrived at your decision on the size of table you need, the next step on the specification is the choice of tooling you may need. Summa can provide an almost endless number of tools and you could feel swamped by the choice but the company makes the selection process very easy. First, you need to understand that Summa can supply a cutting head with provision for three modules to be held at any one time meaning the machine can switch between several functions with pro The choice of tooling for each of the three slots in the cutting head is easily broken into the four types of cutting head, branching out into countless knives and processing tooling
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