PRODUCT PORTFOLIO: Tried & Tested - Polar 76.(Polar-Mohr cutting machinery)(Brief Article)

Twenty years of production haven't diminished the popularity of Polar's most successful guillotine, the 76

The Polar 76 is still the most successful guillotine Polar ever produced, with sales of over 30,000 during its production lifetime. It's still also a big seller on the secondhand market, with machines being snapped up almost as fast as they become available. According to Premier Guillotine Services director, John Barraclough, 'the 76 is still a very popular model' and 'is a very good machine generally'.

The two most important things to check when buying a secondhand 76 are that it has a valid safety certificate and that you are buying it from a reputable dealer.

What made the machine revolutionary for its time was the fact that it was driven by a gearbox, not the hydraulics more commonly found on SRA2 guillotines. Gearbox engineering is arguably more accurate, certainly more powerful, and because the knife is pulled by the gearbox instead of being pushed by the hydraulics, there's less wear and tear on the knife-driving mechanisms themselves. The gearbox made the Polar 76 machine about 20% more expensive than its competitors at the time, but printers bought them in their thousands in the knowledge that the Polar name guaranteed a high residual value and reliability. Once Polar had set the pricing precedent, the other manufacturers caught on: now most SRA2/B2 guillotines are gearbox-driven.

The 76 was a programmatic machine, and the electronics are reputedly more reliable than most. It can store up to 99 programmes, and also incorporates the Eltrotac step-and-repeat system - a revolutionary facility at the time - which allowed users to programme in the finished size of the document including the gutter, and the 76 would automatically programme the cuts at the right place. This was a highly popular feature, because it saved a lot of time over manual cut-and-mark routines for smaller finished sizes.

The electronics also allowed random access marking, which meant that the backgauge could move backwards and forwards instead of moving to the backstop and forward from there: ...