In our latest video, GEW’s North American distributor for sheetfed and wide web formats, GMH UV, speak to WhatTheyThink magazine about their relationship with GEW and how this relationship is allowing them to serve customers in the region.
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Pat Henry (PH): This is Pat Henry, WhatTheyThink, and with me today to talk about the market for UV technology are Grieg Heimbuch and Michael Bates. Grieg and Mike are partners in the firm GMH UV, which is based in Arvada, Colorado. Grieg, let’s please start with you. GMH UV is the official North American distributor of sheetfed offset UV curing systems from GEW, a leading supplier of UV curing systems based in the UK. How long has that relationship been in effect, and how did it come about?
Grieg Heimbuch (GH): The relationship has been, in effect, actually about three years right around now. We were working for another manufacturer. GEW was looking for someone to, represent their product in North America. We met with them, realised, you know, that they had a great product, great service, great support. You know, great people. And, it was just like the timing was impeccable, it was a marriage made in heaven.
PH: Michael, how is that relationship helped your respective companies to grow the market for UV curing systems in North America?
Michael Bates (MB): I would say that, initially, GEW didn’t have any type of… well… they had a small presence in the sheetfed market, but not very established. So what has worked out with us, and them, is that we have a ton of experience. I don’t know how many years in the industry Grieg and I have combined, I hate to add that up, but it’s many decades. So from our previous experience with AMS and moving forward with GEW, we were able to bring the sheetfed market to them and then bring an excellent product and, technology to us. And it was, as Grieg alluded to, it was a marriage made in heaven, really.
PH: Please talk about the market segments, the print market segments that you address, and how your product offerings support those markets.
GH: The GEW product, is interesting in that it’s kind of, forward looking, unlike most of the products in the marketplace. In the past, it’s always been you either put UV or you put LED on a press. With the GEW ArcLED technology, what we’re able to do is, you know, put UV on the press, or put LED on the press with a casing that holds the lamp, whether it’s UV or LED and the customer, if they’re so inclined, can go back and forth from LED to UV without really making any other changes in their press, you know, structure or power supplies or anything like that. So it’s really a unique product offering that, you know, frankly, is giving us, real strong representation in the OEM market and sheetfed in North America. And it allows us to go into the retrofit market and allow people not to have to make that UV or LED decision today when they’re not ready to make it.
PH: I want to come back to both, ArcLED and the retrofit market. Michael, if you could talk in a little bit more detail about, you know, which which segments of the market, that your products are covering, I believe you’re pretty well represented in narrow web for labels, other segments as well.
MB: Correct. We have agreed with GEW, GMH and GEW, that we would handle the sheetfed segment from 52cm up to 205cm. Also the large format web, I would say from 100cm up to 200cm or whatever it might be. So we we have several projects in the 57-inch web format that we’re working on and have done. So we handle those segments. Anything below, let’s just say anything below 36 inches or 38 inches is left to GEW, and their current sales team.
PH: Okay, so between the two of you, you’ve got the gamut of printing widths covered from small to to VLF.
MB: Correct.
PH: Let’s go back, if we could, to ArcLED. I think I understand how that works. I can have conventional arc lamps or LED arrays in the same cassette in any, curing position on the press, that I want. Can you go into a little bit more technical detail about how that works and why is that a desirable feature for me to have?
GH: Well, technically it’s fairly simple. And Patrick, one of the things you have to know it doesn’t fit on all presses, because what we are doing is we’re putting a casing in between the units or in the end of press location, depending on where you’re curing. It does in most, but it doesn’t in all. So we put a casing there and that casing is permanent and allows us to slide either a UV or an LED lamp into that location, depending on what the customer need is.
Why is it important? Well, today most customers when they’re buying curing technologies for presses want to put LED on the units, because it’s cleaner. It doesn’t produce as much heat and it gives the output a great look. And it’s cured off the end of the press and it’s environmentally much safer… you don’t have to vent to the outside. Those types of things.
Most customers today, because the coating technology isn’t as far along as maybe we would like it, are purchasing traditional UV for end of press. So you have LED on the units and UV at the end of press. Well, we can basically take those technologies and intermingle them as we want based with the ArcLED technology. So it’s very forward looking and allows customers if they want to put UV on the units today, and we can fit the ArcLED casings in the units, two years from now, if they say, you know what, we really need to go to LED, our customers are telling us we need to go that way. We don’t have to do that forklift upgrade where we take everything off the press and put a new system on, and we can simply supply them with new cassettes.
MB: Also with LED there is no heat. It’s very sustainable. So if we have traditional UV, mercury vapour, you have to dispose of lamps, bulbs, that’s mercury filament. You know not all are mercury but there’s some type of iron doped or some other type of metal that’s inside those bulbs. So what we want to do is always make sure that we’re looking from a sustainable advantage. And LED is completely sustainable that way. There’s no moving parts, there’s no heat being generated, there’s no ozone being generated.
So what we’re finding is, you know, ten years ago we didn’t have the industry moving towards that technology. It was new and young. So at this point now we’re getting the majority of what the inquiries are is moving to LED technology to support that sustainable growth within their organisations.
PH: I think that leads us to the next question. We know that GEW supplies many of the UV systems that the leading offset press OEMs bundle with their new equipment, but as we know, there’s a very large installed base of older printing machinery out there that could be retrofitted for UV and all the benefits that it would bring. How can you help the olders, the owners, I’m sorry, of that older equipment, make that happen?
MB: I think Grieg mentioned earlier that not all presses can be retrofitted. So there’s a certain amount of UV preparation that’s involved on a retrofit machine, and there’s got to be a certain amount of room available to us. We’ve done machines in the mid 90s all the way up to the current date, today. What we want to do is make sure that there’s availability, there’s protection. If you do an excess, as Grieg alluded to earlier, if you use an end of press mercury vapour to cure coatings, you want to make sure that you have water cooled pans throughout the machine, which that’s part of the retrofit. At some point when these were manufactured, there was none of that technology available to that particular machine. So we have to add quite a few things to prepare these machines to get ready for UV, and not so much LED.
So LED it’s not an exorbitant amount of heat. In that case, we don’t have to shield lines. We don’t have to have a water cooled pan in the delivery. So it’s a much more seamless installation. But again, we still have to have the room in between the units of the machine and at the end of the press to retrofit a machine. So I guess what I’m saying here is not every machine is capable of being retrofitted. It really depends on the year and the type of machine.
GH: And Patrick. That’s really part of part of the process. And that’s one of the great things about our experience, and GEW’s experiences, is that we can go into these printers that have machines that are older, that they want to, maybe get a few more years life out of them by adding curing technology. And we can go in and really kind of do an evaluation of it, and tell them pointedly, hey, yeah, we could do this, or it’s really not doable on this type of press, this style of press. So that’s one of the great things about the relationship between GMH UV and GEW is they have great experience with the curing technologies. And Mike and I have, you know, pretty darn good experience in the commercial space. So we really complement each other very well in that.
MB: I would also add this, Patrick, if there’s companies out there that have perfecting machines that they’re putting impression cylinder jackets on, they think this machine has run its course.
PH: Yeah.
MB: LED is a perfect installation for them to rejuvenate that machine. Okay. We can put a lamp at the perfecting unit, a lamp at the end of the 8th, 10th unit and reinvigorate that machine, really. Because now all of those things that they’ve dealt with in the past, jackets, impression cylinder jackets, all these things are now obsolete because we’re putting a dry sheet through that machine. So those perfectors have a longer life than I believe a lot of people realise, unless they’re familiar with UV, the UV technologies that are available to them.
PH: So with the curing, I eliminate marking at the perfecting stage.
MB: Correct.
PH: All right. Well, I think, as you said at the beginning the relationship between your field experience and GEW’s expertise in the technology, is a marriage made in heaven. And I want to thank you for sharing that with us today.
MB: Thank you. Patrick, I want to, if I could… I just want to acknowledge Hans Ulland, our former partner who’s no longer with us. We miss him dearly. His vision was instrumental in putting this partnership together. And, we’ll always think about him in the industry. And as a dear, dear friend to both Grieg and I.
PH: Yeah, thank you for that. Anyone who’s acquainted with UV technology, was acquainted in some way or another with Mr. Ulland. So, as you say, he is very much missed. Well, I want to thank our guests today, Grieg Heimbuch and Michael Bates of GMH UV for a great discussion. And I would also like to thank our sponsoring partner, GEW. This is Pat Henry. WhatTheyThink. Thank you for watching.
MB: Thank you.
GH: Thank you.
To learn more about GEW’s products for the sheetfed market, go here.
