McAllister Litho has increased capacity in its large format department, installing a SwissQPrint Nyala 5 flatbed printer matched by a Zund cutting table.
The boost to capacity comes two years after the business made its first strategic investment in large format printer with a Canon flatbed and Veloblade cutting table.
“We have found that the Canon simply could not keep up with demand,” says director Brian McAllister. “This is four or five times faster than the Canon. And quality is better even at speed.”
While the SwissQPrint machine is not the cheapest on the market, this is balanced by lower costs for consumables and running costs he explains.
The printer is specified with white and varnish alongside the standard four colour inks. “We can’t print the additional neon colours,” says McAllister, “but we can achieve all the raised image effects using the varnish including lenticular and textured surfaces.
“It will print reversed out type and 4pt text. But we decided against the light magenta and light cyan options as that type of close viewed photographic work is not our market and when not using the extra channels they still need to be looked after.”
The rapidly expanding workload comes equally from existing litho customers wanting some display work and from new customers to the business. “If we needed to have the extra colours we can expand if necessary,” he adds.
As with the commercial work that the Glasgow company produces, there is a range of product types produced on the large format machines, from display graphics through to window films where the high opacity white ink scores, being able to print in a fewer passes than before.
The Canon and the Veloblade remain in use. The current investment is additional rather than replacement capacity. The new Zund, which has followed the Nyala into operation, offers greater flexibility, especially around routing than the Veloblade.
It is still early days for both. “Everyday we use the printer we are coming across other things about the press. We like the tip switch vacuum channels and the registration pins that are screwed into place. With others the pins are raised an lowered pneumatically and at some point pins will stick in one or other position. With the screw-in pins, nothing can go wrong,” says McAllister.
