UV flatbed printer site preparation is the part of the purchase that nobody quotes for and everybody pays for. The machine clears customs, the haulier books a Tuesday morning delivery, and at 08:40 a crate sits on a flatbed on the road outside a roller shutter that is 200 mm too narrow. Nothing about that is a manufacturing problem. It is a measurement problem, and it was solvable eight weeks earlier with a tape measure and two emails.
A machine in this class is not heavy in absolute terms. Longrun Printing Machinery publishes a unit weight of 0.5–1.5 t depending on configuration, well inside what a standard counterbalance forklift handles. What makes it awkward is the combination: a wide rigid frame, a crate larger than the machine in every direction, a precision assembly that dislikes being tipped, and a delivery window that assumes you have already done the groundwork. This is the groundwork.
Start from the crate, not the machine
Every dimension that matters on delivery day is a crate dimension, not a machine dimension. A supplier who tells you the machine is 3,300 mm long has told you something true and useless. Export packing adds a skid, bracing, corner protection, film or a moisture barrier, and often a plywood shell standing clear of the frame — and that shell is what has to fit through your door.
Ask for four numbers, in writing, on the proforma invoice or the packing list — and put them on the same RFQ specification sheet as the print specification, so they are answered before the machine is built:
- Crated dimensions — length, width and height, as packed, per crate.
- Crated gross weight per crate, and net machine weight separately.
- Number of crates — a flatbed printer often ships as a main crate plus a smaller crate of ink system, spares, RIP workstation and tooling. A cylindrical or rotary machine may ship with a separate jig crate.
- Centre of gravity and sling points, marked on the crate faces.
The gross-versus-net distinction is where the first surprise lands. Crating on a rigid machine routinely adds a meaningful fraction of the net weight, and the rigger, crane hire or forklift capacity check has to be run against the gross figure. A 1.5 t machine can present as a 1.8–2.0 t crate. If your forklift is rated 2,000 kg at 500 mm load centre, and the crate's load centre sits at 900 mm because the tines cannot reach the far side, the derated capacity may be under the crate's weight. Load-centre derating is printed on the forklift's own capacity plate, and it is the most common reason a lift that looked comfortable on paper gets refused on site.
The second detail worth knowing before the container is booked: export crates for most destinations must comply with ISPM-15, the international standard for wood packaging material, which requires heat treatment (or an approved alternative) and a legible IPPC mark showing the country code, producer code and treatment code. The mark should appear on at least two opposite faces. If the mark is missing, illegible or applied to non-conforming timber, the consignment can be held, treated, re-exported or destroyed at your cost — and demurrage runs while that is decided. It is a supplier question, not a shipping-line question. The wider mechanics of export crating and heavy-lift handling are covered in the CMH guide to shipping heavy machinery from China.
From truck to final position: the access survey
Run the route backwards. Stand where the machine will live, and walk out to the road, writing down every constriction. The survey below is one afternoon of work and it removes almost all of the risk.
| Stage | Measure | Common failure |
|---|---|---|
| Road and approach | Vehicle length, turning circle, overhead cables, gate width, gradient | 40 ft trailer cannot make the turn into the yard; delivery reverts to a transhipment yard at extra cost |
| Unloading | Dock height vs trailer bed, or forklift tine length and rated capacity at the crate's load centre | No dock, and the site forklift's tines are too short to reach past the crate's centre of gravity |
| Doorway | Clear opening width and height, with shutter fully retracted and the shutter box measured | Crate passes on width, fails on height once it is 120 mm up on skates or a pallet truck |
| Internal route | Corridor width, corner swing (diagonal, not just width), floor transitions, thresholds, drain covers | Right-angle turn where crate length exceeds the corridor width on the far side |
| Overhead | Lowest beam, pipe, sprinkler head or light fitting on the route | Sprinkler head struck by the crate — a fire-system callout, not a printing problem |
| Final position | Machine footprint plus service clearance on all four sides and above | Machine placed against a wall; the head carriage cover cannot be opened for maintenance |
Two things in that table cost more money than the rest combined.
The door height trap. Machines are moved on skates, rollers or a pallet truck, and every one of those lifts the load. A crate that clears a 2,100 mm opening on paper does not clear it sitting 120 mm up on machine skates. Measure the clear opening from the finished floor to the lowest point of the shutter box, with the shutter fully open, and subtract the lift height of whatever will be under the crate.
The corner swing. Corridors are surveyed on width and lost on diagonals. A crate 3,200 mm long turning a right angle into a 2,400 mm corridor needs the geometry checked, not the width. If it does not work, the options are to unpack in the yard and move the bare machine (which is narrower, and which the supplier's engineer may or may not sanction), or to take out a door frame or a section of stud wall — cheap if planned, expensive on the morning.
That leads to the question buyers should put to the supplier before the machine is built rather than after: does this machine split for doorway access? Some industrial flatbeds allow the gantry, bed sections or side cabinets to be removed and refitted; others are a welded or pinned frame that enters assembled and is aligned once. The answer changes your access plan completely, and it may also change your commissioning cost, because a machine that comes apart has to be realigned by someone qualified. It is not stated in Longrun's published specification, so ask, and ask specifically whether a split-and-rebuild is covered by the installation scope or billed separately.
Floor load: distributed rating versus point load
Most buyers check the wrong number. A floor is usually specified as a uniformly distributed load in kN/m² or kg/m², which is what a warehouse rack or a stack of pallets applies. A printing machine applies almost none of its weight uniformly — it applies it through a handful of levelling feet or mounts, each of which is a point load, and briefly through skate wheels or forklift tines during the move, which is worse.
Take the arithmetic seriously. A 1,200 kg machine on six levelling feet, each with a pad about 80 mm across, puts roughly 200 kg onto about 50 cm² — on the order of 400 kN/m² under the pad, an order of magnitude above the distributed rating of a typical light-industrial slab. Ground floors on grade absorb it because the slab spreads the load into the sub-base. Mezzanines, suspended floors, tiled screeds, raised access floors and older timber-joisted first floors frequently do not.
The practical rules:
- Ground floor on grade is the default. If the machine is going upstairs or onto a mezzanine, get a structural engineer to sign off in writing, and give them the crated gross weight and the point-load pattern, not just the net weight.
- Spread the load during the move. Steel plate or heavy ply under skates and along the route protects both the floor and the machine. Point loads during transit are transient but higher than the resting load.
- Ask about levelling. Number of feet, foot type, whether the machine is levelled on the feet or on shims, what tolerance the alignment is checked to, and whether it needs anchoring. This is also a re-visit question: precision machines are levelled at install and often need re-checking after a settling period.
- Check the surface, not only the structure. Epoxy coatings, tile and thin screed chip and dent under skates. A dented floor under a levelling foot means a machine that will not hold level.
- Confirm the slab is flat enough. Levelling feet have a limited range. A slab with 15 mm of fall across the machine footprint may exceed it and need grouting or a plinth.
There is a stiffness reason to care about flatness as well: on a machine with a bed as large as 2500 × 1300 mm, a frame twisted by an uneven floor shows up in print registration long before it shows up as a mechanical fault.
Room conditions, compressed air and services
The room is a specification item, and it is one buyers usually discover the week the engineer arrives. Four services need to be in place before the install date, and only one of them is electrical.
Temperature and humidity. Industrial UV inkjet is sensitive to both, in ways that are easy to underestimate. Ink viscosity moves with temperature, which moves drop volume, which moves colour. A cold shop in January and a warm shop in July print differently from the same file if nothing else changes. Humidity matters in the other direction: in very dry air, rigid plastics and board build a static charge that attracts dust straight onto the substrate and can deflect ink drops in flight; in very humid air, substrate brought in cold from a yard can carry surface condensation that ruins adhesion. Typical industrial-inkjet installations are run in a stable, heated, non-condensing environment rather than an open shed — but the specific temperature and relative-humidity window is a machine specification, and Longrun does not publish one. Get it in writing, and get it as a range with a rate-of-change limit, because stability matters more than the absolute value on a machine with linear encoders and a precision gantry.
Compressed air. Most industrial flatbeds use air for pneumatics, and many use it for head maintenance or substrate handling. Three numbers matter, and buyers usually ask for one:
- Working pressure (bar or psi) at the machine inlet.
- Flow (L/min or CFM) at that pressure, which is what sizes the compressor, not the pressure.
- Air quality class to ISO 8573-1 — particulate, water and oil. This is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that destroys valves and contaminates heads. A shop compressor feeding a machine through an untreated line delivers water, compressor oil and pipe scale. A dryer plus a coalescing filter and a point-of-use regulator is a small cost against a head or valve block.
Extraction and lighting. Ask whether extraction is recommended over the print area, and control the room's lighting: strong daylight on a print bed makes colour-approval arguments unwinnable.
Space around the machine. Service clearance is not a nicety. The engineer needs to reach the head carriage, the ink system and the electrical cabinet, and you need loading room on the bed's long side. Ask for a footprint drawing with recommended clearances marked, and lay it out in tape on the floor before the crate arrives.
Common questions
Do I need a crane, or will a forklift do?
For a machine in the 0.5–1.5 t band, a suitably rated forklift with long tines usually handles the unload, provided the load-centre derating is checked against the crate's gross weight. A crane or lorry-mounted arm becomes necessary when there is no hard standing, no dock, or an overhead obstruction. Decide from the site survey, not from the weight alone.
Can the supplier's engineer do the rigging?
Treat rigging and installation as two different scopes. Installation and commissioning cover positioning, levelling, connection, calibration and training. Moving a crate off a truck and through a building is normally the buyer's responsibility, and in many jurisdictions requires locally licensed and insured lifting operators. Longrun's published process lists remote and on-site setup, training and spare parts at the install stage — confirm in the contract where that scope starts, and read the CMH guide to installation and training terms on China-built machinery before you sign it.
What if the crate does not fit and the machine has to be unpacked outside?
It happens, and it is survivable if planned. The risks are weather, uncontrolled handling and warranty. Agree in advance and in writing that unpacking outside is acceptable, who supervises it, what protection is used, and that the warranty is not voided by it — rather than leaving it to a haulier who wants to get away.
What to ask the supplier next
Send these with your purchase order, before the machine is crated. Longrun's published terms are T/T with a 30% deposit and 70% before shipment, so the balance falls due before the machine reaches your floor — a machine that arrives to an unready site sits crated while the warranty clock runs. Attach the answers to the installation plan, and run the site survey against them.
- Crated dimensions and gross weight per crate, plus number of crates and what is in each.
- Uncrated machine dimensions and net weight, and the machine footprint drawing with recommended service clearances on all four sides.
- Does the machine split into sub-assemblies for doorway access, and if so which ones, who realigns it, and is that inside the installation scope?
- Centre-of-gravity and sling-point marking on the crate, and lifting instructions in English.
- ISPM-15 heat-treatment marking on the wood packaging, and a packing list matching the crate labels.
- Levelling specification: number and type of feet, levelling tolerance, whether shims or a plinth are needed, whether anchoring is required, and whether re-levelling after settling is a return visit.
- Ambient operating window: temperature and relative-humidity range, plus any rate-of-change limit, stated as a machine specification.
- Compressed-air requirement: working pressure, flow at that pressure, and ISO 8573-1 air-quality class, plus the inlet fitting size and type.
- Extraction and lighting recommendations for the print area.
- Installation scope in writing: what the engineer does, what you must have ready on the day, how many days on site, and what happens if the site is not ready.
Longrun Printing Machinery is a reasonable case to put that list to — a Shenzhen manufacturer established in 2009 in the Longgang district, running a 40-person engineering and assembly team at roughly 300 machines a year, selling from a single unit, publishing unit weight at 0.5–1.5 t depending on configuration, quoting EXW, FOB and CIF, crating for sea or air, and listing remote and on-site setup, training and spare parts as an install-stage step. The crate dimensions, the ambient window and the air specification are not published numbers, which is exactly why they belong in the purchase order rather than in an email on delivery day. Tie the answers to a written pre-shipment acceptance test, and tie the acceptance test to the milestone payment structure rather than to a calendar date.