Call Bob Deets’ inspiration for the Scribe Velocity a leap of imagination–or even a vision. He got the idea for the high-speed, commercially-rated, full-color digital printer, which entered the market this month, four years ago while he was watching the movement of a robotic table his team had just designed. The programmed motion along two axes allowed the table quickly to capture washers in 24 locations from a plunger on a fixed, overhead arm.
“We got to thinking if we could put some inkjet heads on the head of that arm, and have the table move back and forth under it, that would be a pretty good printer,” says Deets, whose injection molding business relies on hot-stamp and ink-pad printing like the rest of its industry.
When commercial-grade inkjet printer heads became available two years ago, he and his partners, Glenn Sahlin and Frank Pagano,
poured their knowledge of graphics, printing, plastics, industrial automation and ultraviolet light–along with about $150,000–into two versions of Scribe Velocity printers. Patents are pending.
“You could line up golf balls in a mile-long feed and quickly give each one a unique mark and multiple colors,” says Deets, who notes that the annual market for product decorations is $1.5 billion. “It prints like a machine gun.”
Barely out the door with the invention, Deets won second place–and a first infusion of $10,000 in outside capital–in Ben Franklin Technology Partners‘ Big Idea competition this month. He’s also expecting an order “for a couple” Scribes from a company in New Jersey, and, after presenting the device last week at a digital printing show in Amsterdam, is hoping “we will wrangle a few sales out of that” at about $50,000 a printer plus costs for customization.
Still weighing his expansion plan, Deets expects to be hiring assemblers later this year.
Source: Scribe Printing, Bob Deets
Writer: Joseph Plummer