Wedding Invites – Helpful Tips
What’s a Kluge?
A Kluge is an automatic platen press used for foil stamping, embossing, debossing, letterpress printing, scoring, die cutting and numbering. We have a total of 8 Kluge’s inhouse that are constantly running. This blog is going to focus on foil stamping and die cutting on a Kluge.
I am going to walk you through the process from beginning to end. The first step is to mount the die to the platen. The platen is then heated to 250 degrees. We only use copper dies because they provide the highest quality possible.
While the press is heating up, we check for position and even impression. The foil is wound through the press and heat and pressure are adjusted based on the artwork and paper stock.
Due the amount of coverage for this job, we are stamping 4-up. We would normally run a larger sheet and stamp 8-up but in this case we can’t because we are using pre-kiss cut label stock.
Then we twist the sheet and stamp the other side.
As soon as the first press is up and running, we start setting up the second press for the next color. It’s important to run both colors simultaneously to make sure we are in perfect registration. The second color is run the same as the first, 4-up work and twist. It’s a little harder to see the second color – look closely for the thin gold rule.
The next step is to set up a third press to die cut the sheets. I know I said earlier that the sheets were already kiss-cut, so why do we have to die cut? Our customer ordered individual labels not labels on a sheet and in order to give them perfect margins on the finished piece we have to die cut.
The last step is to take the sheets over to the cutter for a final trim. We just have to box these up and they are off to the customer.
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