Printplus Group has added a Horizon StitchLiner 5500 to cap a spend of £1 million in the past year.
The company has moved from two cramped locations in Blackpool to a much larger factory at Poulton-le-Fylde, close to the seaside reort. It now has 2,000m2 under one roof and has taken the opportunity of the move to re-equip.
Managing director Adam Ray calls it a ‘supersite’ and “part of that investment is the StitchLiner”. It has also installed a Speedmaster XL75-5, guillotine and Autobond laminator.
“We have always produced a lot of trade work, now we are looking at more business to business customers and have taken on people to drive that part of the business,” says Ray. “There are a couple of guys developing the website.
“Previously we were full to capacity and we didn’t have the space to expand.” It had to run separate sites for print and finishing shuttling work between them. Elimination of this saves £50,000 a year, says Ray.
The StitchLiner will perform a key role in increasing the quality and speed of stitched work that the company can produce. It has been installed with three VAC600 collating towers. “We had been looking to replace our booklet maker for a couple of years, but didn’t really have the footprint that we do now,” says Ray.
“This is more robust. It has a five-knife trimming option which means that we no longer need to trim products before stitching because we could only trim the forage before. And we can run two-up jobs.
“Not having to top and tail work makes completion a lot smoother and faster. The StitchLiner is fast to set up and easy to change over from A6 to A4 or to A5. And the flexibility to handle a wide range of run lengths from 100 to 50,000 will push productivity to a higher level.”
This comes through touch screen control to set the machine in around two minutes. The line includes the ACF30 accumulator to gather sheets from the collators. Sheets are scored and folded before stitching and trimming on the HTS30S trimmer.
With two B2 presses supported by digital printing to give sales of £1.5 million with 24 employees the company is the largest printer on the Fylde coast, says Ray. “The next stage, though not until the summer, is to upgrade the digital printing kit.”
The Speedmaster XL75 is the flagship of the Heidelberg B2 stable.
