Finishing & Screen Printing

in-print colour automates even more of its finishing functions

Thursday 24. March 2011 - in-print colour is investing close to £250,000 in finishing equipment, adding more automated cutting and folding to match up with its highly productive Speedmaster SM 52 ten-colour long perfector.

“With the Stahlfolder TH 56 we will have a ‘ten-colour folder’ to match up to our ten-colour press,” says managing director Paul Coulson. “I want the ultimate in automation and the TH 56 has six plates and then four with a gatefold option, meaning we can provide a really comprehensive range of folds.”
The quick turnround commercial printer, with its own design service, delivers high quality offset and wide format metallic print and has high folding demands. It has folded more than 3 million products since December. This includes print in runs from 500 to half a million. With the increased folding automation, in-print colour will be able to swap between jobs when there is an urgent requirement to do so, returning to the original run very quickly and easily.
On the cutting side the company is upgrading from a Polar 78 guillotine to the larger Polar 92X Plus with touchscreen controls.
“We are cutting tonnes of paper and with the B2 rather than B3 format it will be eaiser to handle the paper,” says Mr Coulson. “We like buying from Heidelberg because they have the best products, best trade ins and are easy to deal with having partnered with them for so many years.”
Only last year the Malton, Yorkshire, company beefed up its perfect binding, replacing a Eurobind EB500 with the more automated EB 1300. With guillotining, folding, stitching and perfect binding in-house it has the control and productivity it needs to give customers optimum quality and response.
“We only buy the best and automation is critical. We must be the most advanced for a B3 printer of our size in the UK. We continue to invest and to maximise the turnover per head so that we are very efficient,” says Mr Coulson.