“Stop the Presses!” and Your Servos

printing-press-by-jinx!

Long ago, before online news sources and social media, a remarkable event could lead to someone running into the press room and shouting, “Stop the presses!”. The idea would be to stop your printing press, update the news stories, and then start printing again with the correct and current information. The famous press error “Dewey Defeats Truman!” would never have happened if someone had shouted “Stop the presses!” before that famous headline was printed.

If someone came running into your press room and yelled that famous phrase, would you be able to stop the presses? A lot of printing press servos run 24/7 and never stop or only go down for scheduled maintenance. Although it’s unlikely that someone is going to run into the press room and yell to stop the presses — they’d probably just text you — you probably will need to stop the presses at some point, and you want to do it right.

Why does stopping machines lead to errors?

Sometimes we have customers who find that stopping their presses results in a lot of errors that need to be resolved before the servos for the presses can run again. If you need to stop quickly for a safety emergency reason, you’ll want to start back up immediately once the problem is resolved. Sometimes it’s not possible, though — and that can be costly.

One of the causes of this is clearing errors but not fixing the underlying problem. When the servo stops, the error code returns.

Note that this doesn’t mean you had corrected the errors, and stopping and starting causes the errors to happen again. Actually, you’ve had the problems all along. You’ve just been hiding them from yourself.

If you’re running Indramat or Rexroth servo motors and drives for your printing press, keeping your servos error code free should be a priority. Error codes are intended as communication, after all, so taking care of the issues will keep your presses running and get them back up quickly in the event of a stop.

Clearing the codes without fixing the problem just leads to failures down the line.

Error codes can be hard to understand and sometimes are symptoms of an unexpected problem. Instead of trying to guess at the issue and using trial and error, call in an expert who knows what the problem is and how to solve it. Sometimes error codes lead you down the path of costly repairs when they’re actually caused by a completely different issue. Experts like us can get you up quickly in the most cost effective way—and let you stop the presses if the occasion arises.

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