Has your crew ever installed a new ceramic creping doctor blade only to find it has a defect from a chip in the ceramic? Blades with chips and cracks will cause a defect in the sheet, which is not always immediately evident when a new blade is inserted. This can be very costly.

Before the blade can be changed, non-saleable product has been produced and more downtime is required to change the blade. An even costlier scenario can occur when the chipped blade causes damage to the Yankee surface.

Many tissue makers live with these risks but are not aware that they can be avoided. Using high quality defect free blades that are not prone to chipping can avoid these costly mistakes.

Kadant Solutions’ manufactures its CeraEdge™ creping blade at its manufacturing plant in Auburn, Massachusetts, USA. The quality process for manufacturing these blades is proprietary with specialized procedures to ensure “no-chip” blades. According to Jeff Bowser, director of operations, “There are four unique steps in our process for constructing no-chip CeraEdge creping blades all done right here in the United States. These blades provide a distinctive product for the tissue industry with a no-chip ceramic tip.”

Thermal Spray Process Control

The thermal spray process inherently introduces stress, twisting and buckling into the substrate blade, not to mention the actual application of the coating. Only the most highly controlled processes can overcome this and maintain excellent microstructure resulting in no chipped edges and extra-long blade life. Kadant’s CeraEdge creping blade thermal spray process is multi-layer controlled and monitored over every step of the process and over every inch of blade material produced.

Grinding

Multi-head CNC grinding with proprietary measuring instrumentation ensures tight dimensional control within microns of accuracy. Dimensional information is stored and can be compared to worn blades to understand wear rates after use.

Quality Inspection

All CeraEdge creping blades are subjected to three 100% inspections for chips and two invasive coiling and bending tests to ensure the coating integrity before the packaging process. Microstructure samples are taken and analyzed to maintain stringent quality requirements. Hardness, microstructure, and dimensional analyses are done in our state-of-the-art lab on-site for every coil produced.

Packaging

After the thorough quality inspection, blades are packaged to customer specifications. Packaging options include shipping flat or coiled and in crates or boxes.

Visit the Kadant tissue team at Tissue Word 2018 from March 20-23 in Miami at booth number F100. Or, to learn more about our tissue production solutions, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..