Originally founded in 1904, Queen City Printing has long been one of Ohio’s top suppliers of offset, flexo and digital print products for niche markets. President Ron Busch and the late Luigi LaValle III acquired the business in 1987 and created BLT Corporation doing business as Queen City Printing. 

Located in Norwood, in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Queen City Printing has built a thriving converting business with a versatile business. The company’s tightly packed 10,000 square-foot production facility houses a range of print and finishing technology that allows it to offer a large portfolio of products, but it’s in the pressure sensitive narrow web market that the company has seen major growth, and most of its technology is Mark Andy branded.

“We started with a 7” five-color Comco Cadet back in 1990 and haven’t looked back. In fact the Cadet is still running and producing good quality roll-to-roll jobs for the pharmaceutical sector,” says Busch.

In the mid ‘90s, the company saw a growth in demand for sheeted wet glue labels and installed two digital presses, but it was the move by the chemical industry, which provides much of the company’s business, toward roll labels, that prompted Busch to investigate what options were available.

“It was Labelexpo in 2016 that we started talking with Mark Andy and ended up installing one of their Digital One flexo/toner hybrids in early 2018. It was unique in offering both types of print and converting/finishing inline for single-pass operation – it was tailor-made for our work,” he explains.  

In 2019, with the elderly Cadet at full stretch and demand for flexo work showing no signs of slowing, the company installed a Mark Andy Performance Series P4 press. Its wider 13” web, sixth color and higher running speed significantly extended flexo capacity and has opened new market opportunities for Queen City.

Two years on, it became clear that the Digital One was not providing sufficient capacity to meet the demand for short run digital labels, and the decision was made to replace it with a second series machine, known as the Mark Andy Digital Pro.

Essentially a grown-up version of its predecessor, Digital Pro offers a higher running speed, the option of a flexo unit before as well as after the toner engine and a choice of full or semi-rotary diecutting units. Its 13” web width and 77 fpm performance at 1200 dpi resolution makes it a formidable tool, says Busch. It has a simple and easy to use RIP for handling existing PDFs, requires no clean-room environment and comes complete with an air-cooled LED/UV unit.

“The ability to lay down a flexo white before overprinting CMYK toner on filmic materials has been a real benefit. We use the second flexo unit for security numbering on the reverse for pharma labels and have both types of die station so that we can choose whichever is best for each job,” he explains. “The decision to upgrade was a complete ‘no- brainer’ as far as we are concerned, and while we run mostly self-adhesive stocks on it, it does a brilliant job on the vinyl we use for the industrial market.” 

With the increasing use of BOPP and especially silver BOPP, the company has had issues with static electricity build-up, which has been resolved by locating humidifiers strategically around the production area.

One change brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic was the switch by many from paper to PET liners, which run better on all the label presses. “The pandemic added about 20% to our sales because we had both substrate and press time available when others did not – it’s fallen back a little, but the market has changed because of different consumer shopping habits, and we are feeling the benefit.”

With press capacity now well capable of meeting demand, Queen City knew it had to relieve the bottleneck post press, especially with inspection/rewinding, and once again turned to a Mark Andy Group product, in this case Rotoflex and an HSI 330 model. The HSI is an operator-friendly machine with a horizontal table.  It’s a well-proven design that offers time and waste savings to increase efficiency.

“It’s given us four times the capacity we had before and the advantage of 100% inspection before and after the rewinding, which is essential for our pharma work. It’s easy to use and offers us the ability to vary tension in the rewound rolls – some customers prefer a tightly wound roll, for example in the industrial sectors, while our pharma customers prefer a more loosely wound roll,” says Busch.

This is the benefit of the HSI’s eDrive 2.0 system, which by making better use of power results in improved roll characteristics. It offers high roll quality at any speed and with any number of speed changes and is quick to accelerate and decelerate under full control. Although a recent installation, Busch claims it has already made a major contribution to efficiency post-press and completely removed production hold-ups.