Mutoh Contour cutters
According to Mutoh, contour cutting industry’s current focus and demands lie more than ever on saving time, improving performance and avoiding waste due to badly or wrongly cut preprinted stickers. Print businesses and professional sign-makers require a reliable, worry-free, automated print and cut process.
Mutoh has been a pioneer in cutting plotter technology since 1994 and has more than 30,000 Mutoh cutting plotters installed in Europe. Their high-performance cutting plotters are designed for vinyl cutting, contour-cutting and through-cutting. Mutoh believe that sign-makers can enjoy the multiple benefits and comfort of Mutoh’s alternative print & cut approach, which is to have two machines working in perfect tandem as well as independently.
Kris Berghs, Area Sales Manager for Mutoh Europe, comments, “At Mutoh, we believe a perfect collaboration of the individual cutter with any printer capable of printing on PVC for contour cutting of preprinted signs and stickers is the best approach. Mutoh print and cut combo solutions offer the highest level of flexibility for print, cut and print-to-cut applications.”
For print-to-cut applications, Mutoh’s print and cut combos offer an automated workflow, controlled from a single production software. Mutoh cutting plotters are available in widths from 77 cm to 190 cm (30” - 75”) and are fit for vinyl cutting as well as for contour-cut and through-cut applications. They all integrate a laser sensor, which will recognise registration marks on preprinted graphics. This way, the cutter will know perfectly in which area it will have to do contour-cutting or through-cutting. “With our Lite 140, Advanced 160 and Premium 160 cutters, manual intervention can also be fully eliminated thanks to integrated barcode reading, offering a truly foolproof print-tocut workflow.”
The Mutoh ValueCut cutters are designed to work seamlessly with any printer capable of printing on PVC for contour cutting of pre-printed signs and stickers. A complete set of high quality cutting blades is available, tuned to give perfect cuts and easy weeding. Thanks to the incorporated innovative tangential simulation mode, you can make miniature letterings, intricate graphic shapes and obtain perfect cutting quality in thick materials.
Mutoh’s ValueCuts are equipped with 3 pressure rollers and can cut a broad range of sign making materials ranging from selfadhesive PVC to sandblast, up to a maximum thickness of 0.8 mm. The cutting force up to 600 g guarantees optimum cutting results on a wide range of materials. Cutting speed is adjustable up to 1080 mm/s at a maximum acceleration of 3 G, which enables a cutting speed up to 1530 mm/s and an acceleration of 4.2 G in diagonal movements.
He concludes, “In a nutshell, as opposed to an integrated print and cut device, you can print and cut simultaneously, print faster on the widest variety of substrates, cut faster, cut heavier and stiffer substrates, cut longer rungs with the highest accuracy and cut full pre-printed rolls without user intervention. It also important to remember that the economic life cycle of a cutter is much longer compared the economic life cycle of the printer.”