Kala Laminator - New Slitters

Just received the new style slitter for the back of the kala mistral laminator. For those that know, people have been waiting on these to be released as the original style doesn't cut the best. Haven't set ours up yet, but just by looking at it it seems kindof cheaply made in comparison to the older style. Much less beefier, and the slitters themselves seem like a light duty plastic compared to the original, aluminum ones.

Directions on how to set it up are vague to say the least. Anybody test theirs out yet? Work any better than the original?

 

Ran a roll through this morning. Doesn't work that great, at least not how we had it setup. Original style slitter seems to work much better (once we changed the angle of the blade by removing bolt from back rod and letting it ride on top of bracket).

Material would feed nice and flat to the takeup while the slitters were not cutting. Once they were down and cutting, material didn't' run flat anymore. It was as if the blade was giving too much resistance, causing the material to bunch up right before it causing skewing and bad cuts. If we held a finger on each side and kept it taught as it was running, it worked better but still wanted to skew.

I feel as if the original style worked much better (after modifying) Hopefully I'm missing something in the setup, because this new style is really lacking.

A few things we noticed and will try to fix on the next roll:

The slitter table has about 3/8" slop side to side. May be intentional to help compensate for skewing material? We tried shimming it tight during our first run, but it may have made it worse. So we removed shims and let it "float" didn't notice much difference. But we will leave the shims out for now.

Going to leave about 4' of blank vinyl on the end to get a few wraps fed through and around the takeup before engaging the slitters. May have needed some more feed time to get nice and tight?

going to try doing a relief cut for the slitter blades (with knife) instead of using the slitters themselves to puncture the material upon setup. With the new style slitters, they only ride on (1) square tube instead of (2) round ones, so they aren't as stable and don't seem to be super square to the material. Because of this, after puncturing and locking the blades in, the blade wants to start about 1/16" outside of the puncture. This may be part of the binding or bunching issue?

I'll post some pics up to help paint the picture.

 

old vs new style

As you can see, the old style looks like a production grade piece of equipment. This new style looks and feels like a kids toy.