The Birmingham-based firm has invested around £160,000 in new and additional machinery in the past few months, which has also included an MBO folding machine and a Yorkshire Packaging Systems wrapping line.

The two VAC-1000 towers, which the company bought from Intelligent Finishing Systems (IFS), were installed in August.

The VAC-1000 collating tower features a rotary suction feeding system that operates effectively on a wide range of paper stocks at speeds of up to 9,900 sets per hour. It also features a high-power double-feed detect sensor comprising of high-intensity infrared LEDs at each bin.

“We were winning more and more work and are entering our busiest time of the year for calendars. We needed help with the increased workload and with collating sets that would have been done by hand or sent through our existing collator twice,” said director Rob Hart.

“You can put pretty much any sheet through it now. This gives us a lot more control of what we can do, especially as people are specifying a number of different grades. The fact we can do almost anything and everything ensures we have a huge amount of flexibility.

“It has taken a production headache away as well. We had a bottleneck when it came to keeping up with the binding but now we are faster and so our turnaround times are quicker.”

The Renz machines, which were installed last month, included a Punch 500 heavy-duty production punch, Autopunch 360 automatic punching system, Mobi 500 wire-binder and Autobind 500 HS semi-automatic binding machine.

“The new Renz equipment will allow us to increase our production and take on a lot more calendar and book work,” said Hart.

The Renz Punch 500 has a maximum working width of 500mm with a 4mm punching throat. It can be used for book and calendar work, thick covers, digital stock and photographic paper. The Autopunch 360 features short set-up times and punches small quantities efficiently, according to Renz.

The Mobi 500 can bind books and calendars from a minimum 50mm to a maximum 500mm working width and the Autobind 500 HS features automatic product ejection, fast set-up and high binding capacity.

Ace Binding, which has 26 staff and a turnover of £1.5m, also operates Muller Martini and Heidelberg machinery. It provides a range of trade finishing services including PUR binding, perfect binding, wiro binding, saddle stitching, laminating, punching, folding and guillotining.