I'v had a 2001 PM 46 2 color for 2 years and I'm surprised how productive it is. BUT I cannot print envelopes on this machine with any consistency. I have a suspension feeder. On the best day we ran 20M #10 in 3 hours - great for me... Most of the time it's hit and miss feed and not feed, stop mess around and screw around. I've tried substitute brands of envelopes and there is no rime or reason. #9's won't run straight enough to sell the job feeder or feedboard. I have a tremendous amount of faith in my Heidelberg trained mechanic, but he offer no answers.
When you say suspension feeder is it a feeder bought through Heidelberg? When you are having problems are they late sheet, early sheet or strictly envelope feeder problems? Have a make and model number for the feeder?
We have one of the Press Specialties C-9000 envelope feeders for our BaumPrint 18 (QM-46) as well. We run 30M envelopes per day all the time. It's not a flawless piece of machinery but it's a great improvement to the QM-46/BP-18 press and would highly recommend them. Without this feeder, envelopes are a huge pain but with it, they're faster, easier and run almost error-free. Check it out, they're well worth the investment! In addition, they're not permanently mounted to a specific press like some of the others so you can wheel them up to any press or move them around in your pressroom as needed also. Good luck!
I'v had a 2001 PM 46 2 color for 2 years and I'm surprised how productive it is. BUT I cannot print envelopes on this machine with any consistency. I have a suspension feeder. On the best day we ran 20M #10 in 3 hours - great for me... Most of the time it's hit and miss feed and not feed, stop mess around and screw around. I've tried substitute brands of envelopes and there is no rime or reason. #9's won't run straight enough to sell the job feeder or feedboard. I have a tremendous amount of faith in my Heidelberg trained mechanic, but he offer no answers.
THanks in advance for any help you can give me
Dan,
I have worked on the QM since its inception and you are right, envelopes can be an issue, but there are things you can do to help. Number one , do you have the extended suckers on the press? these help alot. Number two, make sure your feeder timing is set right, im sure your mechanic did this. The big issue i found is that the bail bar is very large and bends the envelope when it comes down to the pile. Whereas you cant stop the bail bar completely, you can put a rubber band around it to take some of the pressure off, this helps alot.
As far as the suspension feeder, the older ones were not as well made as the new ones. i am installing one right now, and i have ran #10s AT 10,000 with no problems. there are certain things that need to be done on the feeder to make it run. make sure the ctwo rubber wheels are not touching the envelopes when they are in the pile, only the spring should be touching. and only have about a 1 inch pile which can be adjusted by the pile sensor,
let me know if this helps and if you still need help you can contact me on my cell at
The biggest problem are the envelopes themselves. Glued together, twisted little parallelagrams! The rubber band (around bail bar) and sucker hats as mentioned above are good suggestions. They made longer feeder clips and I had no luck with those. I used to divert the OS rear/side air sometimes and that helped. I don't run the old QM anymore as I've moved into the prepress/design area and have aquired a new enemy, Microsoft Publisher
I'v had a 2001 PM 46 2 color for 2 years and I'm surprised how productive it is. BUT I cannot print envelopes on this machine with any consistency. I have a suspension feeder. On the best day we ran 20M #10 in 3 hours - great for me... Most of the time it's hit and miss feed and not feed, stop mess around and screw around. I've tried substitute brands of envelopes and there is no rime or reason. #9's won't run straight enough to sell the job feeder or feedboard. I have a tremendous amount of faith in my Heidelberg trained mechanic, but he offer no answers.
THanks in advance for any help you can give me
There's some great advice already posted that should help you. You might also have feeder adjustments out which would need to be addressed with the service rep. The rubber band around the bail bar works great but check the attachment with this post. This spring keeps a more consistant pressure. With the rubber bands they can be different each time you put them on and wear out as you run. This spring is the same pressure everytime, no variable. Just work with cutting the lenght. The big difference from the Press Specialties C-9000 and the Suspension is the C-9000 runs only 1 envelope down at a time where the Suspension feeder stacks 8-10 envelopes on a pile. With the C-9000 feeder you will not need the spring. The Suspension feeder the spring should help. Also run your side and back air off. Front air on 3 and vacuum on 8-10. With the C-9000 only running 1 envelope at a time the press can't double you can put no air and vacuum on 10 and run. This is I believe is a huge plus. Last thing is what was already stated with envelopes there are many variables thickness, glue, folding inconsistently, Moisture, curl, etc. The C-9000 minimizes this because of the 1 envelope feeding. But again there are more variables with envelopes vs. flat single sheets of paper. Hope this helps.
Press Specialties C-9000 feeder and the extended suckers and we feed envelopes all day. A-2 up to 10x13 is no problem. Remember, some of it requires a little patience, because as you know, envelopes do not always come in perfectly flat. ;-)
Thanks alot for responding. Where are you located? I understand you install these feeder, are you a press mechanic? I've heard from a friend to only have a 1" pile but I can't see how to accomplish that when I'm trying to maintain the same angle of the presss feeder table with the envelope feeder. We can't raise the feeder stand high enough without lowering the back of the feeder.
hi ive run a qm46 set up exclusively for envelopes for 10 years and there isnt much i havent been able to do with the suspension feeder i wrote a previous article a couple of years ago when we bought our second feeder. I start by shutting off the sheet length switch special function 19 run air around 6 little blower action and off to the races. With no exaggeration i can run at 10 non stop for as long as you want . I rarely use the little sheet seperator fingers except on 10 x 13 and run these at 9000 per hr. As far as register goes its normally bang on unless im running 3 colors with multiple passes
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Printing Envelopes on Printmaster 46
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Originally Posted by dan@4theprintshop
