Tom Allison

While not a headline-catching subject, doctoring systems have a big impact on printing quality and overall production costs. ALTHOUGH NOT A particularly glamorous topic, package printers know that doctoring systems represent a complex challenge. The selection, operation, and maintenance of these systems can have a major impact on consistent print quality, along with longer term cost issues when it comes to roll maintenance and life. When selecting the right doctor blade for your application, there are any number of places to begin and approaches that can be taken. For starters, Perry Lichon, president of Retroflex, lists blade material composition, tip design, thickness, and

A review of the top issues concerning doctor blades. THE ARTISTRY OF doctoring the doctor blade is giving way to science. Tom Allison, president of Allison Systems (Riverside, N.J.), remembers when he used to ask his dad what the press operators were doing as he watched them prepare the doctor blade for printing. After hushing his son, Allison's father would say, "Pressmen are frustrated artists; each one has his own 'pallet' of special things he feels that he alone can do to make 'great art' come off the press." Where once true—when the performance of the doctor blade depended solely upon the operator's set-up—now