Micropress will install Tecnau’s BookReady inline to its Canon iX3200 at its Reydon factory in September, becoming the first company in the UK to do so.
The BookReady will cut and stack work from the Canon, making adjustments on the fly with no operator intervention or any need to slow the press.
The company first saw the BookReady at a Tecnau open house in Italy 15 months ago, before installation of the sheetfed inkjet press, and confirmed the order at Drupa.
The finishing equipment is needed to cope with growth in the short run division and to ease pressure on guillotining which has become a bottleneck for the business says joint managing director James Cross. “This should ease that problem quite dramatically. We have grown this part of the business dramatically over the last 18 months with a big growth in sheets printed per months.”
The book blocks produced will be fed into the nine-clamp Horizon Cabs 4000 perfect binding line. This will be a manual operation, at least initially. Horizon has automated the process using a robot and this will be investigated once the BookReady is in place. Micropress has not shied away from robotics having three CoBo Stacks in place as well as a Heidelberg P-Stack high speed robot. “We have also installed a semi-automatic pallet truck to move material around the factory,” says Cross. “It picks up the pallet and we send it where we want it to go. We do like our robots.”
While the Tecnau will be supplied by UK distributor IFS, responsibility for training and commissioning will be down to Canon which has a proven interface between the BookReady and both the inkjet press and Canon’s Titan twin-engined mono press. This was a key consideration for Micropress says joint managing director Rob Cross. “We did look at alternatives on the market but we really liked the simplicity of the BookReady and the automation it offered. It is also set up to go on the back of a Canon iX so we don’t need to complete a collaborating exercise as this has already been done. It should be an out of the box solution.”
