Machine Permits In-House Short-Run Laminating

Krest Graphics, a short run digital printer, has brought all its short run laminating in-house with the installation of a Pegasus semi-automated, hot roller laminator from Encore Machinery.

Krest Graphics, a short run digital printer, has brought all its short run laminating in-house with the installation of a Pegasus semi-automated, hot roller laminator from Encore Machinery.

The Pegasus semi-automated laminator laminates documents from SRA5 to B2 and weights from 115gsm to 300gsm.

Features include a separator and in-line slitting.

It is claimed to operate at up to 10 metres per minute.

Krest Graphics, which operates from a retail outlet in Beaconsfield (UK) has an HP Indigo 3000 and a range of colour and mono digital printers and it offers a full finishing service, laminate covers, invitations and employee incentive material, for instance.

Dave Randall, a finishing operator at Krest Graphics, said: "We were spending an average of GBP1,000 a month outsourcing all our laminating requirements.

Although we were getting good service, it was time consuming and expensive because we had to pay for a courier to take the work to Watford and back.

Sometimes it was not possible to pass on the transport charge.

This added to the cost, particularly if we were only laminating 20 or 30 covers." He added: "We decided to bring all the shorter runs, up to 1,000 copies in-house, which is about 80 per cent of our laminating requirement.

A colleague had seen the Pegasus being demonstrated at a printing exhibition.

It fitted the bill in terms of price and performance and as it is an ancillary piece of equipment, we didn't look elsewhere.

We bought the B2 version because, although virtually all our jobs are B3, it gives us that extra flexibility, should the need arise." Randall explained that Encore installed the equipment and gave staff at Krest Graphics half a day's training and then the machine was in production.

He said that the Pegasus is easy to operate but that the staff learnt how to get the best out of it by using it.

And he added: "It is a hand fed machine so if we want to get maximum productivity from it, then we need two operators.

In an ideal world, it would be nice to have a fully-automated machine, which runs faster than 10 metres a minute but the additional cost would not make it viable for us.

We can always buy an automated feeder at a later stage, should the need arise.

The best feature is its quality.

We can laminate work, which is at least as good a quality as that produced by the external supplier at a fraction of the cost and more than twice as fast.".

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