Metal Closures

Metal Closures (Huddersfield) Ltd is one of the UK’s top suppliers of metal containers for the home care, health and beauty, shoe care and hair care markets as well as manufacturing the metal sleeves used for the presentation of premium brand spirits.

With nearly 100 years experience in this field MCH counts many major high-street brands amongst it’s customers. So the accurate reproduction of corporate livery is critical to their product quality and essential for customer satisfaction.

MCH receive printed tin and aluminium sheet from a number of suppliers which they then stamp and form into the final product, adding threads and seals etc as required.

Traditionally Incoming Quality Control of the printed sheet has been carried out by eye, under ‘daylight’ lighting against retained swatches. This has lead to a number of difficulties in defining colour variations both internally, as well as externally to the suppliers.

A problem exasperated by the very personal interpretation of the bright, adjacent colours used in many modern designs.

They recently purchased an AstraTint, colour measurement and comparison system to independently define colour tolerances. From the retained swatches, the target colour is used as the reference with AstraTint measuring the deviation from this as a ?E value.

Philip Crossley, Technical and Quality Manager at MCH, is currently building a database of ?E values for all products, to enable the accurate quantification of variances acceptable to their customers, while managing incoming quality. He is also encouraging his suppliers to implement a similar system, to eliminate the occasional scrapping of complete batches and save on the wasted delivery miles in such cases

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