Dry-Lam CL-40PR 40" Element Series Professional Roll Laminator

Welcome! thank you for joining in. I'm Bob Cursey. I am your Element Series product lead, Today, we'll be going over our new Element Series, line of roll laminators. We'll start out with this demo; we're going to have a series of three. This one will be particularly covering the unboxing and setup of your new laminator. Due to our time constraint and the number of viewers we have right now, we're not taking any live calls per se during the video, but you can call in on our live line, ask any question you want. They will feed it into us, and we'll try to get you answers as quick as possible. That number is 888-202-5579. And it's the Martin Yale live Expo, or myliveexpo.com to pull this up. So, starting out with how to pick your laminator in the Element Series line, we have basically six models, but basically the standard, the Deluxe, and the Pro, in a 27 inch and a 40 inch. So that's your six models. The first thing you want to do is, what size of project, the maximum size you're running. So basically, a 27-inch-wide roll laminator that's the maximum width of the project. You can run through it, or the media as long as you want. Some of the rolls 250 foot long to 500 feet long. So, our 40 inch is capable of doing up to 40 inches wide. So, if a bigger project, bigger posters, the 40 inch will give you that maximum capacity about anything you want to run through, then the next choice you'd want to make is standard, Deluxe or Pro. These are based on the standard model will do up to three mil lamp or lamination thickness, where the deluxe model will do up to five mil lamination thickness, and the Pro will do up to 10. So, whether it's 27 inch or 40-inch, the same features, just the wider format. Okay, so we'll start right in. We've got our biggest laminator of the line, our 40-inch Pro model. It's a two-man, two-person job to unbox it. So, I'll ask Brian, our head of marketing to give me a hand here and show us how to do this. So first, you just want to take your box, open up the top. Inside there, you're going to find a sheet that was actually laminated by this machine, and it's got the instructions on unpacking on it also gives you a little sample of the quality of the laminator.

So, Brian, if we just flip this over on the edge. Just slide it back to give us a little room here, as you can see, the laminator well packed is going to arrive safe and sound to you. There's a handle on each side. You just slide the laminator all the way out. Now you want to save your packaging, like most manufacturers, in case there's a warranty issue, hang on to your packaging for that to send it back, more than likely, it's going to sit in a storage room somewhere for a year, and somebody's going to discover that's the best Christmas decoration box you can find. So, from there, just roll this over on its side please, and then you can grab by right here. There you go, on the same your little foam padding core. Now we're going to slide out here our dry lamb cart. And just pick up by the bottom two covers. There you go. So, the 40-inch Pro, like I said, is our biggest model, weighs in at about 130 pounds. There you go. Thanks Brian.

So, some of the things to remember when setting up your laminator is, when you're laminating, you're going to work almost 360 degrees around your laminator. You're going to enter your media from the front. It's going to exit through the rear. So, you're going to be working behind the laminator just running. So that's the great thing about the card on wheels. You can put it where you want run your jobs or projects on it and roll it back out of the way. And that is available through purchase, through our website, or again, our 800 number 888-202-5579, 82025579.They'll fix you right up. Okay, a couple notes. The professional or pro, pro model also comes with capabilities of running three-inch core laminate. And what we mean by core. I'll pop that out real quick. So, a role of laminate. This is the interior core. So, one inch model core is what will fit on the standard mandrel. We add a three-inch core adapter when you have a three-inch core, so the inside diameter is your core. Okay, so these are your three inch core adapters that slide onto a one inch mandrel be able to run that capabilities of running that. So, we've got a few zip ties here we'll cut off. And those are for packaging, so nothing moves around on you.

Once again, the different models is based on the size of your project. Like I said, this is a 40-inch model runs up to 40 inches wide, versus a 27 and also the lamination you're going to run on it, whether it's one mil up to three mil, one mil up to five or one mil up to 10. The 40-inch model will do up to 10 mil. It has cooling bank of fans on it. And when running the thicker lamination, like the 10 mil, you have to cool it.

Okay, so some of the features that we have on the rail element series, and like I said, I'll go over some of the basics with you, your mandrels. So, your mandrels are what's going to hold your lamination. And we'll actually load this up and thread it for you. So, you can see this is capable of running not only 40 inch wide, but it'll run all the way down to 12-inch wide also. So, all of our element series, you could do 12 inch wide, up to 27 inch wide on the 27-inch, 40-inch wide on the 40 series. Okay, so we're going to remove the feed table. I'm going to grab a couple rolls of laminate here. Sorry to get in front of the camera on you.

Okay, one of the hardest things is mentioned is, you know, I don't know how to load it and I don't know how to thread it. If you just take the time step through it a couple times, you'll never have a problem again. So, first of all, I'm going to pull off the mandrels. I'll kind of work from the back side. So, these are preset pressure rollers, preset from the factory. Once again, these are manufactured right here in beautiful Wabash, Indiana. So, it's all USA made. So, the trick to laminating, knowing about lamination is when you're loading it, you have to know which side of the laminate to load where. So, if you don't know anything about laminate, that's okay. You're about to learn. So what laminate is, and I'm just going to use basic terms, I'm not going to get technical on you, is basically plastic with a coating of blue or adhesive on it. So that's what we'll call it, your plastic side and your blue side. So, some people say a shiny side and a dull side, but when you're working with matte finish, they can look really similar to each other. So just get a feel for it, and you'll fill a slick side and you fill a side that's got the blue or adhesive on it. Okay? So now the next step is, you want the blue side to not touch your heated roller. That is a bad, bad thing. It's just going to melt and you're going to have glue all over your roller. And trust me, that's a couple hours to clean. So that's what you don't want to do. So, the easy thing to remember is, like said, the shiny sides always going to go against your heated roller, so I check real quick, and to get my shiny side against my heated roller, I want my pressure wheel on this end. Okay, so the mandrel just slides down into the laminate just like that. And then I give it a little more push, and it's in. Slide In this side, drop down my pressure wheel into my brake. And so, as you can see, the mandrels free spinning, but the mandrel has to grip the actual inside of the laminate that's to keep pressure on it. And we'll go over that in a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and load my bottom side. Same thing. I want to find my side with the adhesive, my side without the adhesive. So, I basically want to load it just like that. So, yeah, that's one of the tricky parts. Is, you know, which end do I put in so. Once again, this is your mandrels. Put a little bit of tension so they kind of dig into the core a little bit, tap it into place slide that, in. Drop and then you always want to make sure there's a leading edge that on the grip roller so it locks into place. And your pressure wheel should be all the way to the outside of the frame. Okay, so your films on your machine, you're ready to thread it. So, I usually start with the bottom first. They're idler, roller a top, and the bottom, the bottom, you kind of just reach around. I take my lamb in it. I don't have any pressure on it. It's free spinning right now. And another big thing with lamination is static, static. You can see how quick this grabs onto itself. So that's induced into the laminate in the manufacturing of the actual lamination. So, the when you have a lot more static in the air, it's already in this that just makes it even worse. So that's just one of the things. There's no getting around it, no getting out of it. So, take this, come into the backside. And once again, when you load the film, especially when you're new to loading it, do it cold. I know a lot of manufacturers say you can let load our machines hot. In other words, with the heat on the rollers, we can load these hot too. There's not a problem. It's just when you're working around a heated roller, and if that happens, the glue side happens to touch it, it's going to start melting it right away. So, we got our bottom loaded. So, and now we do our top. Like I said, the tops a lot easier because you're working. So once again, you can just check yourself. My non blue side is going to go against the roller. My glue side is actually going against the idler, but it takes heat to activate the blue or the adhesive. So, the other trick I do is you want your upper and lower rollers to be in alignment with each other, and what I mean by that is where they're going to lay on, where the laminates going to lay on the roller, because they both have adhesive on it if you've got a mismatch, say, for instance, I mismatched this on purpose so you could see that. So now one roller is going to have about a one-inch stripe of glue on this side and a one inch on this side. So, before I ever put it into the heated roller, I actually will take it and roll it down here and get my alignment set. So, you can see, here's that one-inch difference I've got. I can either move my top roll over or my bottom roll over, either one to get that alignment. So, I like working from the top. Just going to slide that over. Try to slide it over an inch. Roll it up a little bit, so I'm back in alignment. Take that still got just the slight gap, which will put just a ribbon of glue on that roller. So, I'm going to try to get it perfect. Because, like I said, the cleaning glue off the rollers is not fun at all. It can be done. It's not a problem. They actually make a little magic eraser to do that. So, there I'm in alignment now, so I can just roll that top one back up. This is your safety heat shield, and you'll hear things such as NiP. The nip is where the two rollers meet. That's where all your pressure and your the maximum amount of heat is because of that. So that's what the safety shield is. Or to guard that nip.

One thing I will need is a threading car. So, Brian, if you've got some kind of card stock. So once again, you can see and working around this wise, it's a lot easier to do cool. There's some of that static. I'm talking about how it's already balling up, which that's okay. It is dreaded taking the top sheet up. And to thread this, we're going to need the power it up. So, to thread this, then you can take any kind of cardboard media, they make a threading card, which is just a piece of cardboard, and you'll just put it into the nippy rollers. And we will, Brian, if I send this through there, can we plug this in to power it up? Okay, kind of slide it over here a little bit for you. Once again. As you can tell, these videos aren't rehearsed. We're kind of doing it on the fly, and that's a good thing. That shows you, even a beginner can do it. Okay, so we're plugged in, we're going to power up. So, you've got, like I said before, earlier in the demo, you're going to be working from the front and the rear boat. So, the power switch is in the rear. You can hear it just powered up. I'm not even going to heat up the rollers yet. I'll swing around here so you can see. Let me turn it a little bit for you. It's right here. Power Switch, your fuse right where your cord is. And then you'll see when they turn on, they came up to 32 is 32 degrees. The speed is set at five. That's where it comes on. Every time you turn one on, they're preset to come up to that so I'm going to turn my speed down a little bit to thread it, and I'm not going to power up the heaters on it, on the rollers, till after we get it threaded, so I just put a little media in there. Want to hit run, and you kind of feed it through. And here's where you want to make sure you get around to the back side and out she comes.

Once again, this is where you'll get the most static. When you're first feeding it through and it's unheated, tends to have a lot more static. So, I hit my stop button. Remove my threading card. We also the Pro models and the deluxe models all have horizontal cutter on them, a trimmer for the back end, but I'm going to wait till we actually heat up and laminate before I trim it. When you go to trim the unlaminated material, it tends to want to ball up a little bit. So, from that, we would put on our feed table. Just drops right into place. There's your safety heat shield, and as you can see, the laminate, you can even see some waves in there. Once it's heated up and warms up, it'll just turn a crystal clear and smooth right out. A couple things to mention about the Element series we have in colloid through heaters in our rollers. So, it's a hollow core roller with the heaters through the rollers. One of the great benefits of that is the other way, is over a heat shoe, and that the heated roller actually has less marring, less friction. So, when you're pulling the laminate over a heat shoe, you run the risk of marking your materials. In other words, your finished product could have little marked scratches in it. Because of that, the heated rollers are a lot more consistent and hold their heat a lot better. So, one of the other great benefits, too is the setting when you're laminating, basically you have heat or temperature. You have the speed which you're feeding, and then the pressure, the amount of pressure you're applying with your rollers on your media and laminate. With the Element Series. We've tried to eliminate the rollers or preset pressure already preset on in the factory. You can't change that without taking off the cover, and we're capable by doing that, we can still laminate from one mil all the way up to 10 mil without having to change pressures. So that's one less setting you have to do. The speed and the temperature setting is all controllable, digitally controllable. And the benefit of that, I know some want presets on there. Well, the preset is going to change based on the quality of laminate you put in it, and the media you're putting into the laminate or your document, whatever your project is, the thickness is going to change your heat and speed. So, a little bit about laminate, like I told you before, think of it as just plastic with glue on it or adhesive, and it?s heat activated. So once the heat supplies, like I said, this will all clear out, and then it's ready to feed your media. You'll laminate is done in mil thickness. Whether it's one mil, three mil, five mil, 10 mil, that's the actual thickness of it. Three mils is 3000 for the thickness of a sheet of paper, which is probably the most common. So, if you're using three mil laminate, and you're putting in a sheet of paper, you're going to have six mils plus your document when you come out. So, you're up to nine mils. That's what gives it some rigidity. There are different grades of laminate. So, you've seen it out there where you've got standards and deluxe in the same three mil gloss, let's say. And what that is, is the amount of adhesive versus the actual plastic or material that's going on. So, they can do three mil but they use a thinner plastic and put a lot more glue on it. That's low end, low quality. You can do a three mil with a thicker plastic with less adhesive. That's your high quality, okay, which gives it and the higher the quality, the more clarity and rigidity you get with it. Okay, I'll step around to the back side, once again, the features digitally controlled as far as temperature and speed. It's got a hot button where I could hit hot and bring it up the temperature automatically to 230 and then I can control from there if I want to take it up farther, which 276 is where we usually go. Your cold button turns off the heaters and the motor immediately. Another good feature we have, and we'll cover that and more when we get the laminating, is the heated rollers and the pressure roller are mechanically linked together. So, in the event you would get a jam in your heated rollers, it stops your pressure rollers too. And that's a great thing. The worst thing that can happen is a wrap up. In other words, your immediate gets wrapped up around your rollers, because then it gets just keeps wrapping and wrapping. So that prevents a lot of that. Once again, this is the deluxe model with a heater bank in between the heated roller and the pressure roller in the rear, the rear roller strictly pulls it across the fans which cool it down. That saves your document or whatever you're heating in there or laminating in there from curling or some of the toner from bubbling out. So, it does a very good job there. And don't forget martinyale.com to register your product after you've unboxed it, serial numbers on the backside, on the serial label, so you can go right on there, register right online. And once again, I thank you for tuning in. We'll cover actual 27 and 40 inch actually laminating, whether it's laminating documentation or poster boarding or posters themselves. We'll cover that in our next video. So, any questions or concerns at all, you can call in at 888-202-5579, and once again, we thank you for joining us on my live expo.com and that's your Element series.