A Challenge CMT-330 three-knife trimmer from Terry Cooper Services is helping London financial digital print specialist Kube Print target a 20% increase in turnover to £4.5 m.
Running off line with a book loader and vertical delivery, the Challenge CMT-330 three-knife trimmer, is matching the production from a newly-added four clamp PUR perfect binder.
Adam Frost, managing director, explained, ‘We are seeing a greater demand for faster turnaround short run digital perfect bound books. At the same time we are being asked to produce more and more PUR bound jobs, both digital and short run litho. The new binder means we now are able to do this inhouse but there was no point being able to bind the work faster if it was then delayed waiting to be trimmed.
‘We looked at what systems were available and the Challenge CMT-330 three-knife trimmer perfectly fitted our production needs. It produces a high quality result, has a small footprint and its speed is impressive. It can also reliably feed books up to a 50mm spine automatically and was a very cost effective choice for us. Build quality was important too and as TCS has supplied a number of other machines to us over the years we know and trust their performance.’
He continued, ‘It helps us increase our production capacity because and we no longer have bottlenecks on the guillotines, which have been freed to do other things.’
The company’s investment programme is expected grow the company more than 20% within a year. It included two Ricoh Pro C901 digital printing presses. They support the existing HP Indigo 5500 and Oces – 2 x VP6200s and a 2110. Litho print is produced on a five colour Heidelberg XL75 with Anilox coater and Inpress Control.
The Challenge CMT-330 three-knife trimmer is designed for on-demand printing and features full digital control of the trimming process – servomotors control all adjustments normally made by hand with a traditional trimmer. The control panel features a graphic LCD display of the job being trimmed. For repeat jobs, the CMT 330 offers job memory storage of up to 99 book trimming jobs.
It also boasts an eight-station cooling tower for in-line systems, a serial communication port for remote setup and control for fully automated bookshop environments, custom-designed edge guard shields for the knife, easily accessible blade and infrared sensors monitoring each waste bin.
Mr Frost concluded, ‘We now no longer need to wait for the guillotine and the fact it is a one person job means we can use staff in other areas of the bindery, ensuring smoother, more effective throughput.’
