How to Choose Felt Conveyor Belt for Your Flatbed Digital Cutters

Felt Conveyor Belt (felt cutting underlay) is one of the main consumables on flatbed digital cutters (flatbed digital cutting systems) aside from knife blades. A good felt conveyor belt extends operation time of a cutter to a maximum level and delivers great performance in terms of precision and continuous process.

Flatbed Digital Cutter – Tools and Applications

Flatbed digital cutter is a cutting machine of CAM, which is used to cut flexible material such as paper, vinyl, corrugated paper board, textile, composites, various foams, etc. without physical dies. It can also route some rigid material, e.g. Forex, Dibond, MDF, etc. like normal CNC machine as equipped with routing tool.

Flatbed digital cutting systems are of versatile functions for various applications due to different tools available. The most common tools we can find on the market are tangential cutting tools like drag knife, kiss-cut tool, electric oscillating tool and pneumatic oscillating tool, others like drive rotary tool, router, V-cut tool, creasing wheel tool, punching tool, etc.

Thanks for its versatility, flatbed digital cutters are widely used in segments of signs & display, print & packaging, apparel, furniture, composites, footwear, bag & suitcase, floor material, etc.

Choose Right Felt Conveyor Belt for Your Segment

Here we walk you through two segments and explain how to choose the right felt conveyor belts.

Signs & Display

Flatbed digital cutters are now inevitable productivity tools for your finishing work if you are running business of advertising signs and display manufacturing. It is required to cut and route lots of material with prints such as vinyl, magnetic, PET film, PVC film, PVC foams of different density (Forex, for example), plastic and aluminum sandwich board (Dibond, for example), acrylic and so on. Some are rolls and some are sheets, some with precise prints and some simple. As the blades will cut through most material held down on the bed by vacuum system, the surface of the bed would certainly be touched and hurt. This requires a flat surface which is and has

- Minimum thickness error

- Perfect flatness

- Anti-cut

- Good abrasion resistance

- Nice air permeability

- Flexible enough for different turning radius

- Almost slag-free

The grey double-side felt conveyor belt made of PET fiber with reinforced textile in the middle is the most common choice for the cutters after decades of practices. Double-side NOVO felt belts are the best sellers portfolios of SCplus. We manufacture and supply these felt belts of thickness at 2mm, 2.5mm, 4mm, 5.5mm and width up to 3 meters.

With over 80% market share in China, SCplus keeps innovating and offering the best user experience for our customers all around the world. A study indicates SCplus double-side NOVO felt belt extends the conveyor lifetime by about 30% compared to others in China and is more competitive than foreign brands.

Apparel

MTM (measure to made) mode derived from Germany and Japan in 1980s and has become popular in China since 2015. Data from market reports in 2019, clothes made by MTM mode took 1/10 of the total in value in China. Capitals and technologies are flocking in this traditional industry with innovations to enhance the production flexibility and improve auto workflow and fast response. Single-ply and moderate multi-ply textile cutting has become one of the key processes of apparel manufacturing. Together with CO2 laser cutting machine, flatbed digital cutting system plays important role in the cutting rooms.

Drive rotary cutting tool is required for single-ply textile cutting in real practice. The round or decagon blade would cut into felt belt a little bit so that it cuts off the textile. Thanks to this requirement, felt belt conveyor used for the flatbed digital cutter would wear down very quickly, say, one to three months to remain normal operation, while that used for signs and display industry lasts up to 1.5 years.

Particularly, white felt belt conveyor is requested for shirt textile cutting. Imagine that slags cut from felt belt of gray, blue, green, etc. would “contaminate” the cut patterns and the cutting rooms would not bear this contaminated patterns flowing to the sewing process.

So, felt top conveyor belt for cutting rooms requires:

- Better air permeability

- Lower coefficient of friction

- Minimum thickness error

- Perfect flatness

- Anti-cut

- Almost slag-free

- Particular customized color

SCplus works closely with customers and work together to come up with great solutions to cope with issues countered during development and operation. The NOVO white felt conveyor belts of us are the proofs of win-win results and credit given by our customers and markets.

The price of a felt conveyor belt accounts for 1/30 – 1/50 of a flatbed digital cutter and it matters to choose a right one for good cutting performance. Learn as much as possible each element involved in the cutting applications and then choose the reliable and your trusted supplier who understands them well.