Top 10 Secrets of Web Handling

Presented by David R Roisum, Finishing Technologies, Inc.

Way back in 1995, very early in my career, I wrote a paper entitled the 10 Commandments of Web Machine Design. It was given at several venues including the 3rd International Conference on Web Handling put on by the Web Handling Research Center at Oklahoma State University. You can find a link to this paper and all the other WHRC products in the show notes.

Since then, I have been into more than 1,000 plants, conferences, tradeshows and the like. I learned from working with thousands upon thousands of people, just like you, who struggle with and often overcame serious waste, delay or customer complaint issues related to web handling.

So much has happened that it is time to add the other bookend to my 45 years of web handling. This time it is the Top 10 Secrets instead of 10 Commandments. The subject is the same, web handling, but the treatment is far different. The old 10 Commandments conference paper focused on prevention. This new top 10 Secrets is about troubleshooting, a topic that I’ve had enough experience to write two books and teach it as a two-day short-course on the subject.

As a troubleshooting series, we must absolutely start with your customer, which we will show is not as simple to identify as you would like to think. Then we move to economics. Next, we show how to ‘see’ because your eyes and the eyes of the operators are undoubtedly the best instruments there are for web handling troubleshooting. After those necessary preliminaries, we will move to more traditional topics like wrinkling, winding, problematic processes, rollers and controls. We finish with some warnings about how to see and avoid troubleshooting troubles, hopefully long before you get in over your head.