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Vac-1000s Streamline Thomas Loughlin

Liverpool trade finisher Thomas Loughlin (Liverpool) Ltd is hoping its latest investment in two Horizon VAC-1000 collating towers from Intelligent Finishing Systems will help it continue its 8% year on year growth.

Founded in 1891, the operation has a strong portfolio of saddlestitched, perfect and wire-o bound products both in miniature and normal format including matchbox booklets and a wide range of calendars.

The addition of the two towers, with a Horizon ST-40 deep pile stacker, was made to enhance its portfolio of services and streamline production. Explains managing director Tony Aspey: “Workflow is much smoother now so throughput is faster.”

However, Mr Aspey said the new towers had also added a vital level of functionality: “We can now criss-cross collate which makes a huge difference to one of our monthly 5,000 long-run jobs. There are 80 leaves and so with 20 bins that is four passes. But now we can criss-cross them it is much easier and faster to find the unit.”

The towers are helping with the collation of calendars for wire binding as well.

Mr Aspey said the operation’s long term relationship with IFS and Horizon was a key deciding factor. “We had two existing towers but they were more than 10 years old so it was time to upgrade them. We were very happy with them so chose their current replacement. We know and trust Horizon and the new towers have enabled us to expand our capabilities.”

The VAC-1000 runs at up to 9,900 sets an hour and features Horizon’s unique rotary suction feeding system that operates effectively on a wide range of paper stocks. It can handle a variety of applications at high productivity, with flexible, powerful programming and user-friendly colour touch screen operation. There are high-intensity infrared LEDs at each in for double feed detection.

As for the future, Mr Aspey comments: “We have grown 8% year on year for the past two years and with interest in our miniature portfolio and matchbox books growing we think this will continue. Having installed the latest in collating technology can only support us further in our growth.”