Looking after your printing blankets

At Flint Group, our printing blankets are designed for durability. Featuring high smash resistance and advanced carcass technology, products like dayGraphica® 4300 and dayGraphica® 7100 offer robust performance for consistent, high-quality printing. This ensures extended blanket life and lowers overall consumable costs.

However, getting the most out of even the best blankets requires proper packing, torqueing, cleaning and maintenance. From initial installation to ongoing care, looking after your printing blankets is key to improving print performance and maximising your business’s productivity.

Printing blankets undergo significant stress during their lifespan. Repeated wear and tear from impressions, substrates, stress from tensioning, and chemical attacks from inks and solvents can degrade blanket quality over time, affecting the quality of the printed output until the blanket is changed. In addition to increasing the cost of consumables, every blanket change requires presses to be stopped, resulting in significant downtime.

Blanket wear and tear is accelerated by improper installation and inadequate tensioning. When blankets are correctly installed and tensioned evenly across the press, the ability to maintain contact with the plate and substrate is enhanced, and the press is kept in true rolling conditions. Correct installation ensures reduced vibration and press bounce, accurate register, and reduced stress on the blanket bars.  Ultimately protecting the blanket, promoting stable ink transfer, and minimising defect occurrence.

Cleaning procedures also play a role in prolonging a blanket’s life and improving print quality. Routine cleaning removes ink build-up, paper lint, and other residues that can degrade the blanket surface, causing wear and tear that harms press performance. Dirty or damaged blankets can cause problems with ink emulsification, plate slippage, and blanket piling, leading to further costly delays and waste. Properly maintaining blankets can pre-emptively address these issues.

Regular blanket cleaning and maintenance throughout its lifespan can further enhance print quality. Blankets directly affect print quality by facilitating ink transfer from plate to substrate, and any debris or residue accumulating over time can lead to streaks, smudges, or uneven coverage. Cleaning blankets is essential for removing these unwanted substances, ensuring crisp, clean printing with vibrant colours and sharp details. If not properly cleaned, contaminated blankets can also retain unwanted ink residues that will be transferred onto subsequent jobs, leading to colour shifts, registration errors, and print defects.

Improper plate-to-blanket pressure is one of the leading causes of defects such as colour and image misalignment. Failure to set blankets up with the correct tension and blanket height can lead to blurry or uneven images and problems like mottling, streaking, or ghosting. These defects compromise print quality and result in rejected jobs and higher production costs – each rejection contributing to unnecessary downtime. By paying close attention during set-up, printers can reduce the occurrence of print defects and improve the overall consistency and quality of their work.

Correctly installed blankets also play a vital role in creating a safer working environment for press operators. Loose or improperly tensioned blankets increase the risk of accidents, such as blanket slippage, web breaks, or press malfunctions that could endanger employees and equipment. Adhering to installation and tensioning procedures is critical to mitigating these workplace hazards.

In today’s sheetfed market, speed and cost efficiency are more critical than ever. Printers need blankets they can rely on. Flint Group’s dayGraphica® products deliver proven quality and performance while reducing printers’ overall cost to print. The high-quality and durable construction of dayGraphica® 4300 and 7100, combined with proper installation and maintenance, helps printers minimise downtime and maximise productivity. 

Furthermore, when paired with our extensive sheetfed offset ink range, fount solutions, washes, and other press room chemicals, these products significantly contribute to printers’ overaching business objectives.