THERM-O-TYPE

THERM-O-TYPE is a family owned business that was founded in 1977. THERM-O-TYPE Corporation designs and manufactures a unique line of innovative, reliable, high quality print finishing and enhancement technologies. Current THERM-O-TYPE products include; sheetfed foil stamping, embossing and die cutting presses, inline die cut waste stripping attachments, foil fusers, foil cutters, cutter/slitter/creaser models, rotary die cutters, right angle slitters, handfed thermography machines and business card slitters. THERM-O-TYPE also sells thermography powders, glitters, fusing foils and films, makeready supplies, watermark chemistry, business card boxes, letterpress tooling and HSFF (high speed foil fusing) supplies. History of THERM-O-TYPE began with thermography. Ted and Joyce Van Pelt, the founders of THERM-O-TYPE, owned a successful commercial printing plant in Venice Florida. They produced thermography for years by hand "dusting" printed sheets and running them through a simple conveyor with a heat tunnel. They saw the excellent profit potential thermography could provide to commercial printers. Unfortunately, there were two problems. Producing thermography with handfed equipment was too slow and labor intensive for most applications. Existing automatic thermography machines were up to 20' long, and used gas heaters that needed to be vented through the roof. This equipment was too large, immobile and generated too much heat to be practical for small and medium size plants. They committed themselves to develop an automatic thermography machine that would be suitable for use in commercial printing plants. The result of this development effort was the revolutionary Model 500 automatic thermography machine. The Model 500 was just over eight feet long and featured a hinged infeed conveyor that could be configured to run inline with most small offset presses, an effective powder application/recovery system, efficient electric heaters (which did not require venting), a vacuum holddown to control paper curl and a high velocity cooler. The Model 500 was all electric, using commonly available power, and, mounted on casters, could easily be moved around even small printing plants. The Model 500 (along with the Model 100 and 200 handfed thermography models) were a huge success, so much so, that Ted and Joyce sold their printing plant to focus full time on developing and producing printing equipment. Operating as a family business, THERM-O-TYPE has continued their commitment to developing and producing innovative, high quality equipment technologies for the printing industry.