The machine, which will be installed at the Leicester-based firm’s 511sqm premises next month, will replace a Horizon booklet production line, which the firm is part-exchanging.
“We produce quite a lot of booklets and we’re currently using a knife-folding system, so we were looking at the possibility of moving to a saddle stitch-type system to produce booklets more quickly,” said managing director Steve Wenlock.
“We weighed up the competition and looked at some alternatives from Horizon but the iSaddle system was the only option that we saw that does A4 landscape booklets.”
Flexpress also runs Ryobi 785 and 524 GX litho presses, an HP Indigo 5600 and a range of Océ digital presses, an Océ Arizona 360GT flatbed UV printer for large-format jobs, and other finishing kit including guillotines, laminators, cutters and perfect binders.
The firm, which has 25 staff and a turnover of £1.8m, produces a range of general print including banners, flyers, leaflets, booklets, business cards and posters for clients including Walkers, Mind, Nuffield Health, The Air Ambulance Service and The Loughborough Building Society.
The iSaddle System is due to be officially unveiled by Duplo at next month’s London Calling event alongside the two other products in the iSaddle range; the iSaddle Duetto System and the iSaddle Digital System.
“The iSaddle family is a saddle stitcher for both offset and digital environments, depending on which feeding technology you add to it,” said Duplo International group commercial director Tony Lock.
“The iSaddle System is an intelligent collator tower configuration that can have up to four collating towers. The iSaddle Digital System is a pre-collated sheet-fed system and the iSaddle Duetto System is a combination of both the towers and the DSF-2200 sheet-feeder in one system.
“The range is an upgrade and replacement for the DBMi saddle stitchers. As we are moving to shorter run lengths and more and more to digital, we felt the need to combine the saddle sheet technology with our automated precision. It does away with the whole process because you don’t use folded sections, you run from flat sheet.”
The iSaddle System offers quick job changeover for less machine downtime, according to Duplo, and the ergonomically designed PC-controlled system enables the whole machine to be managed by a single operator.
It can produce A4 landscape-format brochures and books of up to 120pp. The maximum flat sheet size is 356x508mm with a minimum of 105x210mm or 174x254mm for a landscape format.
The DSC 10-/60i suction towers for the iSaddle System and iSaddle Duetto configurations maintain complete accuracy and each tower of 10 bins come with AMS+ (Air Management System Plus) as standard.
The recommended retail price for the iSaddle range starts from £105,000, depending on the system and the configuration.
