History / Our Process

Flexo Printing

Flexography is so the image to be a printing process which utilizes a flexible plate of polymer material that has been engraved with the customer’s artwork printed is in relief. We create these plates in-house. The flexible plates are mounted onto rotating metal cylinders that are used on our machines. The raised surface of the plate picks up ink from an inkwell and transfers it onto the print surface, (called a substrate), as the substrate is passed between the polymer plate and an impression cylinder.

Each color requires its own plate. We can achieve almost any color using the Pantone Color Match system (PMS) and the GCMI color system, (standard in the package printing industry for coated and uncoated paper).

Flexography is popular for its capacity to print large quantities at very high speeds on various kinds of substrates. At Eagle Converting, Inc., we specialize in narrow-web printing, (printing on narrow width substrates), specifically, packaging and security tape. By contrast, wide-web print work would include corrugated boxes and other types of flexible product packaging materials like foil and film.

To print, the substrate is continuously fed into the flexographic press from large rolls of raw material stock, where some of our machines are able to simultaneously print and cut to measure, yielding large rolls of finished custom printed tape.

Reverse-Out

This is a process by which the “background” of the artwork will receive the ink color, while the actual logo, text, or graphic is left as unprinted, thus leaving the bare tape material to form the logo. Due to the use of printing plates in the flexo process, this method will leave an unprinted line at the end of each repeat, where the polymer plate edges meet around the metal cylinder. Sometimes this line can be incorporated into the design, but it cannot be avoided.

Continuous Print

As mentioned earlier in the Reverse-Out print, because of the printing process, there will be a break where the plates meet on the roller. The majority of customers are able to work around this break and even mask it as part of their design. However, there are a handful of clients that like the “Amazon tape” style and do not want the break so we offer a continuous print option. We can achieve this continuous print by use of a laser engraved cylinder, where the artwork has been engraved directly onto the cylinder. This produces a seamless print with 100{d46d33e0e89ed4dbf75b50b0e590bc905b9b49bd4f61f1e4635da0c7806e48d4} ink coverage leaving no unprinted lines as in the reverse-out method. Customers will need to purchase the cylinder itself, as opposed to paying for polymer plates.