On the banks of the Wupper river outside the small rural town of Ennepetal in North Rhine-Westphalia stands the factory of the company known today as Sandvik Surface Solutions.
For background and context, Hindrichs-Auffermann was formed in 1908, by the merger of two companies which dated back much earlier, to the early 19th century in fact. The merged company specialised in nonferrous semi-finished products and parts.
In the early 1960s Hindrichs-Auffermann started the production of smooth press plates and added texturing in the following decade.
In 2000, Hindrichs-Auffermann was acquired by Sandvik of Sweden, another long-established metal and engineering specialist involved in a diverse range of industries. The most relevant of these for the new acquisition in Ennepetal was the manufacture of endless stainless steel press belts.
Having spent around 50 years developing its extensive range of smooth and textured press plates for discontinuous presses, the former Hindrichs-Auffermann company transferred that skill and expertise onto endless press belts.
Thus in 2008, the Ennepetal company was linked to the ‘belts’ product centre within Sandvik and in March 2009 was renamed Sandvik Surface Solutions.
“We only have one competitor in belts, but several in plates,pointed out managing director Kai Bockenheimer. “If we develop a texture for a customer for a plate, it is thus much easier for us to transfer that texture to a belt – all under one roof.”
The obvious advantage is that a customer producing one furniture component in a short cycle press, and another that needs to match the design exactly on a continuous press, can go to the one supplier. Although continuous application of decors is more common in the manufacture of laminate flooring, larger-volume furniture makers also use this technology.
Sandvik Surface Solutions is supplying a very fashion-conscious market and is continually developing new designs, both inhouse and with its customers. The Ennepetal factory is equipped with a show room/design centre with rack upon rack of press plates and samples of decor panels on MDF substrate.
The design centre also has a small production room equipped with two laboratory presses. Customers can select a texture and a decor paper (many bring their own papers) and the technicians will make up a sample panel while they wait, thus saving a lot of time.
“We always have to focus on new designs,said Mr Bockenheimer. “Currently, designs mixing matt and gloss areas in the texture, and tiles rather than planks, are proving popular.
“As a company we have become much more pro-active too, producing new designs without a specific request from a customer. We are always trying to come up with ideas for the next trend. For example, we created a bamboo design as a suggestion; there are a lot of wood designs out there but this was something different. It produced a mixed reaction, with some markets more keen than others. But it doesn’t have to be just wood or stone designs,said the managing director, showing me a sample of a paisley pattern embossed texture press plate.
Recent years have evinced a growing enthusiasm for ever-deeper and more realistic textures, particularly in flooring, and for register-embossed designs in which the texture makes the surface feel, as well as look, like the real thing.
“We are very good at deep and rough textures – especially for tiles for laminate flooring to give a very natural look and feel to a stone effect for example,said Mr Bockenheimer. “We can produce textures 800 microns or more in depth and we have over 1,000 different textures inhouse.”
Such deep embossing requires several cycles of etching. The plate or belt (and each is made to customer order) must be surface ground, printed, etched, washed, polished, washed again and then the process repeated as many times as necessary until the desired depth is achieved. The final product is then polished and/or peened to adjust the gloss level and to clean the surface. That all takes time.
For plates, this is done in a ‘production line’ system, while for belts, the complete loop is processed on one continuous belt line. Both processes are carried out in the Ennepetal factory.
After the ‘finished’ plate or belt is produced it is sent away to a specialist company for chrome plating to impart surface hardness and good wear characteristics.
Used plates are also refurbished in the Ennepetal works.
Obviously the press plate and the texture, or smoothness, it imparts is only half the design story. The decor paper designers and printers are the other half and Mr Bockenheimer said that Sandvik always cooperates with those companies in developing ideas and developing textures that go well with their paper designs.
“Sometimes we come up with an idea for a texture, such as that bamboo, and ask the printers to make a sample print design to go with it.
“Very often, the end-user of the decor comes to us and tells us what they are looking for and which paper they want to use and we develop the product together.
“A good relationship with the press makers is also important.”
One method for creating textures employs the making of a film of the design which is transferred to the metal plate and the plate is then acid-etched.
Of course we are now in the ‘digital age’ and press plate/belt making is no exception, so digital is the newer method for transferring designs to plates.
“In the digital process you are putting ink, or a UV coating, directly onto the plate without any process steps in between,explained Mr Bockenheimer.
Thus the latest investment for the Ennepetal works, approved in September, is a digital printing line which he hopes to have in operation by the end of 2011.
“For some textures digital printing is definitely an advantage and film can be limiting when it comes to registered embossing. It is a case of the right technique for the right product. Both digital printing and the film technique will continue to be used in production,explained the managing director.
The market for Sandvik has followed an all-too familiar pattern in the last two years of course.
“Last year [2009] was not too bad in general for us but in the last quarter of that year, the situation changed and business started coming back in plates. The belt business has also returned since the first quarter of 2010 and now the market seems to have stabilised,said Mr Bockenheimer.
The press plate and endless press belt business is global and Sandvik Surface Solutions has a presence in all the Sandvik group’s offices worldwide.
“In Russia we are very strong and we have a very good agent there. Turkey is also a good market for us. We have not had so much success in China, except in the high-quality end of the market,said Mr Bockenheimer.
“South America is a very interesting and stable market, where European designs are very popular and the furniture manufacturing sector is growing.”
So this long-established business, which still operates partly out of 200-year-old buildings, is still a truly fashion-conscious one; and those historic buildings will soon be hosting a part of the digital age as the company continues to evolve.
