Extra Aggressive Adhesive For Thermal Labels
The product label we are highlighting this month was a special project for our customer that manufacturers industrial-sized water heaters. They had ordered their large thermal label set for many years from another label printing company. Our customer printed the labels in-house and applied them to the metal surfaces of their water heaters.
When the customer designed a new line of water heaters using polyethylene rather than metal as the outer skin, the product labels were having trouble sticking. That is when Marking Systems got involved. Leveraging our preferred relationship with 3M, we found a material combination that solved their problem quickly and efficiently.
But, it was not as easy as you might think. The entire product label had to be re-engineered because of the special 3M adhesive needed to adhere to the polyethylene.
Here is what we did:
• Because these aggressive adhesives are harder to process, MSI had to use a different rotary press. Being that the product label is 23.5625 long, this was no easy task.
• Because the exact material/adhesive combination was not available from 3M, Marking Systems had to add a laminate to make the product labels thermally printable.
• Finally, in order to make sure that the customer could print the labels in-house without issues, our team at Marking Systems had to adjust the material liner.