The ink-jet machine required excessive cleaning to clear the printhead and still needed regular service to remove clogs. So the Santa Fe Springs, CA-based chemical company installed a Linx 4200 small-character continuous ink-jet printer from Diagraph (St. Louis, MO) to replace the clog-prone machine.
The Linx unit automatically flushes and cleans itself out, says plant manager Cesar Hernandez. “You don’t have to purge it like we did with the other machine. If we left any ink in the old printhead, it would be hard and dry the next day.”
Products packed by Angeles include charcoal lighter fluid, nail polish remover, paint strippers, and other aggressive solvents and thinners. The products are typically packed in cans and bottles in a variety of shapes and sizes, all of which the Diagraph unit imprints with batch identification, Julian date and shift. Such information is especially important on the kind of product that Angeles packs.
“Since we’re in the business of hazardous materials, we need to track our product [in case of] any contamination or anything like that,” says Hernandez. “[The coding] acts like a license plate.
“Before this machine went in,“ Hernandez continues,“we already had a large-character ink-jet printer from Diagraph. When we found out that Diagraph also has a small-character system, we asked for literature describing it, and later went to a plant in Los Angeles to see it in action.”
Seeing was indeed believing and an order was placed a short time later. The Linx system now runs two shifts, five days a week.
“It’s a very good printer and it does the job for us,” Hernandez says. “We turn it on, it works all day, and we turn it off and go home.”
