Horizon System at the Finish for Hatfield B2 Heidelberg House

Hatfield B2 commercial print house Falkland Press has invested in a Horizon StitchLiner from GAE.

Established by owner Andrew Lancaster in 1976, Falkland produces a wide variety of work including business stationery, short run magazines and promotional print, running two Heidelberg SpeedMasters and a Xerox Digital printer. Since Andrew’s son Jon joined the team three years ago, a capital investment programme has seen the focus move to higher quality value-added products with the emphasis on speed of response and bespoke and specialist offerings such as foil printing, embossing and die cutting.

The Horizon StitchLiner has been introduced to replace a standard stitch/fold/trim line in a move that typifies the upgrade process. Andrew Lancaster explains: “What really made it stand out was that it by-passes the folding stage – working from flat sheets and finishing them at high speeds. We also do bespoke work that can range in size and the StitchLiner changes over quickly and seamlessly which saves a lot of time in setting up.”

JDF-ready, the StitchLiner features fully-automated makereadies and works from flat four-page section, eliminating the need to fold into signatures – resulting in time and energy reductions. It runs at speeds of 11,000 bph, has an icon-based LCD touch screen for easy set-up and job memory storage for quick job change over. 

Andrew adds: “The make-ready is very fast. We have a lot of runs between 1,000 and 2,000 and it is important to change these jobs over very quickly and the touch screen makes that so easy. It is more reliable and better built than our previous machine – the StitchLiner is an industrial system.”

Ease of use was also an important factor said Jon: “I have a policy of being able to operate everything in case of sickness or getting a rush job out and the StitchLiner is very easy. I have already run a couple of jobs on it when someone was away, including jobs with six page covers - something we always had to send out previously.”

Falkland Press also replaced an aging drill with a four-headed Dürselen from GAE. Jon says: “We’d had our old drill for about 22 years and got the odd jobs coming in for it. Then we got a really big job and wanted to finish it fast so decided it was time to update this process. The new drill is about three times faster.”