Auto Buckle And Knife Folder Automates Franchise

The first member of the UK's Kall Kwik Group printing franchises to buy an MB prestige Fold Net 52 fully automated buckle and knife folder from Encore Machinery is obtaining greater automation.

Kall Kwik Middlesbrough is the largest Kall Kwik operation in the world, offering complete litho and digital services from design to delivery, including personalisation.

The company has two-colour, four-colour and five-colour Heidelberg presses, a range of Xerox and Canon digital machines and a seven-colour Indigo press, as well as a finishing department, working shifts 24 hours-a-day.

The MB prestige Fold Net 52 has an automatic set-up system, which includes automatic positioning of the setting elements for the flat pile feeder, fold plate stops, deflector, fold roller, alignment rails and delivery roller.

Twenty standard parallel and crossfolds are pre-programmed and it is also possible to save the setting data of more than 200 jobs in the program memory, said Encore Machinery.

The machine is also said to have a short set-up time for repetitive jobs because the speed, sheet gap, shingle delivery, suction duration, counters, double sheet detection and paper travel control are set automatically.

It is claimed to be capable of fold correction to within 0.1mm whilst the machine is running.

Piers Mitchell, the proprietor of Kall Kwik Middlesbrough, said: "We are constantly investing to make ourselves more efficient.

The MB folder is part of a GBP300,000 investment that we have spent this year on new equipment.

We bought the MB folder because we had a bottleneck in the folding area where we were using an old Stahl folder." He explained: "Most of our fold configurations are very straight forward but we needed a machine that would give us as much automation as possible for a quick set-up.

It also had to be easy to operate with minimal training because we wanted the 10 people who work in our finishing department to be able to use it.

We looked at what Stahl, Heidelberg and Encore had to offer before placing the order." He said that the MB folder had all the features the business sought and that Encore was able to provide a competitive quotation.

Mitchell added: "It bedded in very quickly, the training was excellent and now most of the people in the finishing department can use it.

Its biggest benefits are ease of operator use and time saving.

It's difficult to put a percentage on it but it's clearly improving our productivity because we no longer have a bottleneck.

It's a good value folder, suitable for anybody from a one-man band to a large group.

I would certainly buy another but the extra capacity it has give me would mean that I would have to be exceptionally busy indeed because we are using it eight out of 24 hours a day.".

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