Boxway’s Peterlee plant is up and running with its new Kolbus Autobox Multi Nova folder gluer, part of a group wide investment following the carve out of three plants from Saica.
The Autobox was chosen to address a need for high value, bespoke and short to medium run corrugated boxes and to serve a local customer base in the North East. Previously the company has had to rely on shipping this type of job from its plants in Telford and Exeter. The move reduces costs, time and environmental impact.
At the same time the factory has installed a Weipong Venus 1630 four-colour rotary die cutter. This will improve the quality of printing, including being able to print on the inside of a box, a growing requirement as ecommerce booms. The new press will also print on coated boards, again stepping up the ability to produce higher quality print.
This led to a delegation from the business led by general manager Mark Barron to visit the Kolbus Autobox plant in Houghton Regis. To check out the performance of the folder gluer, the company took a range of sample jobs that the Multi Nova would be expected to cope with.
Kolbus Autobox argues that “with a typical run speed of 1,500 boxes per hour, the Multi Nova MN400 is an ideal gluing machine for batches of 500-5,000. Set up times are five minutes for straight line and 20 minutes for crash lock”.
And the experience in operation has born this out. Barron says: “Once our operators gained a satisfactory level of confidence, we started to push the boundaries of the Multi Nova. We looked around for work we were currently hand gluing or was causing us problems elsewhere and were pleasantly surprised at the results. Most jobs went through perfectly well, saving us time and resource.”
Further training is underway at both Peterlees and Boxway’s other plants.
The next step for the business is to push into the point of sale display as well as promotional and presentational packaging sectors, with further investment to deliver this capability.
