Arriving from supplier CMYUK just before Christmas and commissioned in early January, the 1.6x2.5m JWEI JCUT-1625 has been a “revelation” for Blue Gecko, according to Stefan Canale, the firm’s director.
“It’s been running flat out since [commissioning]. It’s performing really well,” Canale told Printweek.
He added that he and Gary Knott, Blue Gecko’s production manager and the other half of the two-man band, use it for “everything: vinyl, cut-sheets, plywood, acrylics, and card”.
“It was the router more than anything else that got us interested in the machine,” he added.
“I know loads of people that have Zünd and Summa cutters, so I’ve seen those before – but it was just a matter of seeing the JWEI up at CMYUK’s demo centre.
“We do a lot of printed birch plywood and materials like that, so it was important we had a good router.”
Blue Gecko specialises in event and exhibition print for brand activations and retail, producing wide-format print on its Mimaki JFX200- 2513 flatbed and UCJV300 roll-to-roll printers for agencies. Currently, the pair work out of a 100sqm unit in the countryside just north of Midsomer Norton, turning over nearly £350,000 last year.
The JWEI’s installation has already helped ramp up business for the firm significantly, Canale said.
“From the speed we can cut things now, jobs that used to take us a couple of weeks to print and produce, we can have done in under a week now. It’s just so much more reliable. We were getting a lot of miscuts, but now everything just comes straight off,” he said.
“We were thinking about getting a new printer before the new cutter, but the issue that we have is space.
“We’re not a big company, so we just don’t get involved with the massive runs of jobs. We end up working on more niche, cool stuff, which is exactly what we want to do. We’ve done all that high-run, low-margin work before. For just the two of us, it’s not worth it.”
