Finishing & Screen Printing

Dallas Shop Stays All-Heidelberg with New POLAR Cutter

Tuesday 12. August 2008 - Slocum Printing, a general commercial shop in Dallas, has relied on Heidelberg presses for decades.

The company recently upgraded its postpress operations with a new POLAR 115 X cutter from Heidelberg. “We’ve been buying nothing but Heidelberg since the 1950s,” said Billy Slocum, who now runs the business. “You can rely on Heidelberg equipment and technologies — they are dependable and you can run them for years.” Slocum prints flight manuals and other in-flight books for a major airline. With some books including specially cut dividers and pages, precision cutting is a must. With the shop’s old cutter, cutting the books would take up to two-and-a-half days — but thanks to the new POLAR, the same job takes four-and-a-half hours. “Seeing this cutter perform has been a revelation,” Slocum said. “The power and precision of the machine is just tremendous. We get more work done, it’s better work, and the guys are not tired from lifting and jogging all day long. We’ve been having a ball with it.” In addition to the new POLAR cutter, Slocum also runs a Prosetter P102 violet platesetter in prepress and two 40-inch Heidelberg Speedmaster presses — a 5-color SM 102 and a 2-color CD 102 — in the pressroom. The shop also uses Saphira violet plates and other Heidelberg Saphira Consumables.