World's First Loading System For Digital Presses

One of Europe's leading point-of-sale printers, the SP Group, has installed the world's first assisted loading system from Inca Digital Printers in Cambridge (UK).

One of Europe's leading point-of-sale printers, the SP Group, has installed the world's first assisted loading system from Inca Digital Printers in Cambridge (UK).

The assisted loading system was ordered to further increase throughout of SP's Columbia Turbo.

The new system has been delivered to the group's Redditch site, which operates two Inca Columbia Turbo printers.

SP's technical director, Nick Stevens, explained: "The Columbia Turbos are fantastic machines, outputting four-colour images on to a variety of substrates.

We operate our Inca printers around the clock and they are extremely productive.

However, like all flatbed printers, they need to be loaded and unloaded with the substrate to be printed and on the Columbia Turbo this takes between 30 - 40 seconds if carried out manually." He added: "This is reduced to 10 seconds on the Columbia Turbo equipped with the assisted loading device, which increases productivity significantly.

The new Inca equipment has proved to be very easy to use and has handled a huge selection of stock very efficiently, regardless of weight, size or material." Stevens also explained that SP has even used the Columbia Turbo to load different sized materials at the same time when the company has printed jobs tiled on the bed.

And he continued: "We use the combination of the Inca inkjet printer and loading device for our longer inkjet runs, using the other Columbia Turbo for shorter run work.

The Columbia Turbos give us the flexibility to print cost effectively anything from one copy to more than 200 and we produced one job recently for 800 sheets - the assisted loading facility made this much easier to complete." The new Inca system provides semi automatic loading and automatic unloading of substrates, from one metre square up to the full 1.6 x 3.2 metre format of the Columbia and can be used with material from 250gsm up to a thickness of 10mm.

The maximum sheet weight is 10kg, whilst productivity has been increased by 35 square metres an hour.

The system consists of a pre-load stack, on a manually operated scissor lift, plus a pre-load table, which gives the operator the opportunity to prepare material - removing film, brushing and wiping - during the previous print cycle.

The automatic offload facility picks up printed stock and moves it from the Columbia's vacuum table to the offload pallet, allowing the operator to simultaneously position a new sheet on the vacuum table.

There is also the option of an electrically powered tug for easy removal and stacking of printed matter, added Inca.

Nick Stevens commented: "The new Inca loading system certainly makes the operator's task a lot simpler.

It has increased the already phenomenal output of the Columbia Turbo printer so that we can provide our customers with an even faster delivery service of first class point-of-sale work." The SP Group, which was acquired by St Ives in 2004, employs more than 400 people between its sites in Redditch and Birmingham.

Facilities between the two plants include large format screen presses, as well as sheet-fed litho and digital printing.

Much of the company's work is sent to retail outlets around the world.

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