Swindon printer ESP has invested in a Tecnau BookReady to run inline with a Canon iX3000 and eliminate manual processes involved in creating book blocks for perfect binding.
The company says that the dynamic cut and stack device will open additional market opportunities. The sheets are cut and trimmed on the fly into stacks which can then be processed in the company’s Horizon BQ500 perfect binder. Previously A3 sheets would need to be trimmed, jogged and guillotined by hand.
Head of digital production and operations Dave Woloszczynski says: “We had been looking for an automated process for the last five years without any luck, until we saw the BookReady at Drupa last year. Our printing process is completely automated. For example, batching the books by size and spine thickness has eliminated the need for guillotining and sorting. Now we just have to wheel the pallet of jogged book blocks straight to the Horizon binders. This makes the finishing process more efficient and gets books out quicker for our customers.”
The production path for stitched products is already automated using a Horizon StitchLiner, which like the Tecnau is supplied by IFS. “We handle a high volume of short run PUR, hardcover and print on demand binding jobs. Before the Tecnau BookReady was installed, to make it more efficient for binding, we had to trim the books from SRA3 sheets, then sort the book blocks by jogging each individual book. But this relies on human intervention, which obviously has a considerable cost attached to it,” says Woloszczynski.
He is confident that the BookReady will handle the existing work mix, providing extra capacity thanks to ease of set up and speed. This then creates opportunities for ESP to develop other applications and markets.
