How do we create our POS and Packaging Material

About Us

Cardworks has been established for over 40 years producing Packaging, Point of Sale and Promotional Material, we have a lot of experience of different print processes and methods of production over that period, which enables us to produce the jobs in the most suitable way. Because of new technology there have been big changes in how we produce  jobs, we have kept up with those changes as digital technology is now a very big part of our production methods, we blend the latest technology equipment with traditional methods to produce high quality attractive POS and Packaging material at very competitive prices, we produce work for many large organisations as well as print sourcing agencies and printers. You can browse through our stock designs or have a look below at our production capability to see how we produce your orders.

 

Design

We start the process using our  our experience in Card design to create the design you need, we have a CAD system with many designs for POS Material and Packaging which we can use or modify to get our ideas and first sample quickly, we can plot samples and produce short runs without the need to buy cutting forms. We can often easily adapt one of our existing designs and sometimes use existing cutters to produce a very cost effective product

 
Our plotter table will handle sheets up to 2.2 x 1.6 metres and all types of corrugated boards. For short production runs it has an oscillating knife which effectively saws the card at very hi speed,  so short runs can be produced more economically than by making cutting Formes, in our design process we try to design the products to fit around standard print press sizes and paper and board sheet size to get best value for money. We have dry mounting and laminating machines to make the samples look almost exactly like the production runs will do, so if you are to go ahead with a litho print job our samples will be almost identical in resolution and finish, this is much preferred by our design agency clients who are selling the job on and need to show their clients what the job will look like.

 

Printing

Colourful printing adds  information and vibrancy to any product, our displays are made to sell your products,  For printing we have Digital print machines for short runs, Toner Based for small format and HP for wide format. We also have extensive trade print contacts so regularly produce Litho including large format - Flexo and Screen printing solutions. To keep costs down for longer runs we supply the board to trade printers. We can also get corrugated board made in plain solid colours at the board mills.
Our toner based machine has a special fuser which allows it to print onto folding boxboard up to 4-500 micron thick so good for header cards insert slips etc. with a sheets size up to 480 x 320mm our wide format machine will print up to 1500mm wide and any length for posters and display material, the wide format uses archival inks which are colorfast for many years.

 

Film Lamination

We have what we believe is one of the largest Film Laminators in the country, specially built for us to be able to take wide format sheets 1100mm wide and laminate a Thermal film, this makes the sheets look almost identical to Litho prints when laminated. All of our mounted work uses this process as it eliminates cracking from the finished product, a common problem when jobs are not laminated or printed directly to the board. This type of lamination also ensures that any short runs we do digitally will match future runs produced by Litho

 
The machine has a 320 mm diameter Chrome roller for max speed and pressure, we use 180 gm paper for all of our digital prints which are laminated, this is nothing like a normal wide format Laminator but a fast machine which will separate and stack the sheets after lamination. We also laminate Toner based sheets from our Xerox with a special sticky film to allow us to die-cut the sheets when required.

 

Board Mounting

We have in-house board mounting as we believe that the best POS material is produced by hi-res digital or litho and mounted to board, this is also the most economical in all but the shortest runs. The combination of the finely printed and laminated sheets mounted to board gives the highest quality finish, this high quality look is what attracts passing customers to your product . We use 170 gm paper and mount to 2 sided corrugated, this gives very little or no noticeable show through of the flute on the finished job, again making a higher quality look to your product. We can also mount to grey solid board or display board and even 2 sheets of 600 micron boards for double sided showcards and dispensers.

Our board mounter was installed late last year and is now getting into full production, we have had it modified to take a very large sheet size, Semi auto operation means fast make-ready so good for short runs but capable of many 1000's of sheets per hour.

Min sheet size A3

Max sheet size  2 metres long by 1300mm wide 

Min Top sheet thickness 170gm Max top sheet 700 micron

Min Mount sheet thickness 600 micron Max Mount sheet is 7mm  

 

Die cutting

Shaped cardboard is our business so we have a variety of machines to cut the shapes that we need from Digital Plotters to an automatic Autoplaten with stripping for long run packaging, we also have machines to slit and crease card as well as a Guillotine.

Digital plotter size 2200 x 1600 with oscillating knife to cut through Corrugated quickly

Crosland Hand platen 1225 x 850mm

Bobst Autoplaten SRA1 630 x 900

Shearline roller press for large format corrugated Boards

sheet size max 1300mm wide x 2 metres

Slitting and creasing of corrugated boards on Kirby 2000mm wide machine

Guillotine trimming 900mm on Wholenberg Guillotine

 

Hand Finishing

We have all of the usual facilities for finishing the jobs in-house, from hot melt and hand gluing to packing, we can make corrugated outer packs using our corrugated slitter and creaser so are able to offer fulfilment services from individually packing your leaflet dispensers, CDUs or FSDU, or offer a complete makeup service including packing your products into our Made up CDU's etc. ready for shipping in bulk or even to individual addresses via overnight couriers.