A brief diversion down memory lane. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I had a job back in 1983. I had a co-op job when I was finishing up my senior year at university, a company, it was called Challenge Machinery. I believe they're still in business. And they make paper cutters, okay? I used a rotary shaft encoder on a computerized guillotine paper cutter to make measurements of the back gauge position. I have a little video coming up here. But the back gauge is the thing that pushes the paper into position before this clamp comes down and holds the paper in place and this immensely strong knife comes down and cuts this big stack of paper. And this was the very first paper cutter that had a video display, and a level of computer sophistication in the market. It has since gotten very good, but this was the very first one. And it was kind of cool because they flew me to Chicago to a graphic arts show. And I got to work in the booth and demonstrate this paper cutter to real customers. That was my first trade show. And the first time I had real customer interaction and it was received very well, people thought it was really cool. It's was like, wow, we've never seen anything like this before. So it was a great project to work on. So I got work experience, and I got college credit for it. I'm like, all right, this doesn't get any better than this. This is really cool. This is a link to this YouTube video here. This went on and on and on. I just squeeze this thing down here so you can get an idea. >> Hey, this is Steve with Mid State Litho. Today, I'm going to be showing you the challenge I780. 780 is 78 centimeters, which means that this cutter has a width of about 30.7 inches. It is a guillotine, fly wheel cutter, which means that it gets all its power from a high speed fly wheel. There is a heavy disc in there, that rotates at a high speed. And whenever we make a cut cycle on the cutter, a clutch is engaged, which translates that power into knife power. And that makes these machines super strong. They can cut through all kinds of stuff. And they also don't consume a whole lot of power compared to hydraulics. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and spin up the cutter. I'm going to push the motor button right here. And you'll hear this thing spin up. [SOUND] So we're looking underneath the cutter. You can see that we have actually a two stage system that drives the fly wheel. And the flywheel is really what gives the machine all its power. The flywheel is basically abig spinning weight. And whenever we want to we can engage a clutch and use that kinetic power to drive the knife. And that's what gives these types of flywheel guillotine cutters so much power. When we actually run the knife, we're using kinetic momentum to drive it. The clamp itself is also using power from the fly wheel, but not nearly as much. And I'm controlling that with a foot pedal down here. And that's also affected by my clamp pressure up here. If I have very low pressure you see that it comes down quite slow. But if I scale that up, I can slam down on the table. Clamp pressure is a big deal on a cutter. If you clamp pressure is not right, if it's too light or too low, it can affect your cut quality. You can get blade draw in a stack, where basically you'll get a little bit of a diagonal action on the cut. And the top sheet might be looking okay, but the bottom one won't be so accurate. So clamp pressure's a big deal. Let's go ahead and watch it cycle. So that thing with the pins on it, that's the back gate. The paper's in position for a cut. >> So they’re pretty cool, you see these little ball bearings things right here? Again, the operator can turn it on or not. So the huge stacks of paper weigh a lot and if they turn on the air pressure for these things you can put a huge stack of paper on there and it basically is floating on this cushion of air. So you can move it around, because you'd never be able to really move it around very well if it didn't have this air that was being released. So the stack of paper presses down, the ball bearing moves down, they're held in position by a spring. And this air under pressure comes up and creates this like little hovercraft. And so you can have this huge stack of paper and you can just easily move the paper around on them. When I got there, they told me they had a bigger unit than this that was wider. Must've been pretty close to a meter, if memory serves. And I said, so just how strong are these paper cutters? And they said, we filled that whole entire opening up with two-by-fours, you know what a two-by-four is, a big hunk of wood? So all this wood, right? And to operate the cutter there's two buttons on either side. Do you see how sharp that thing is? For safety you don't want just a single button to push and have the operator's hand in there because whoo, I mean it's like a hot knife through butter, it'll take your hand right right off no problem. [LAUGH] There's two buttons underneath and they have to be pressed within a quarter of a second of each other. Otherwise a knife won't come down. And so they fill that whole thing up with two by fours, hit the cut buttons, right through. I was like, wow, okay that's a lot of hydraulic power. I was impressed, so I thought it was cool. Okay, so it's a guillotine paper cutter and a back gauge. And so this rotary shack encoder was fed into this computer system, I kept track of where the back gauge was. I sent them the messages to the motor to turn the motor on, to move it forward, to move it backwards. I designed programs that allowed, let's say an operator wanted to cut three by five cards out of much larger stock that was a certain size. I wrote a program that figured out the best way to lay out those three by five cards to minimize the amount of scrap that was generated. It was cool, it was a really fun project. The CPU was a RCA 1802, probably doesn't even exist today anymore. Running at something like eight megahertz, which was really fast at the time, back in 1983. Okay, and just to prove it, there I am. Yes, you can laugh at me. Look at the hair. That was 80s hair [LAUGH]. So this was the computer monitor that we put in. And we had four buttons underneath here, and they each had a function. And when you pushed one of these buttons, it would take you down into a submenu, where those buttons then would have new functionality. And then you could navigate your way down this hierarchy, and navigate your way back up to the very top screen. And then all the numerical entry for creating programs for cut jobs for all the stuff that gets printed. I mean everything that gets printed is cut on paper cutters whether they're these little itty bitty guillotine ones or great big ones. All the stuff, all this 8.5 by 11, they're all cut on paper cutters. Greeting cards, all that, it's a big business. There's a lot of money in graphic arts, paper handling, cutting and processing.
