"It was a great opportunity for UK visitors to see the latest developments in print finishing," said Stuart Bamford, post-press division national sales manager for MBO Group's UK agent Friedheim International.

UK visitors' attention was particularly focused on H+H's fellow MBO company Bograma's range of modular products.

"Very few UK firms are familiar with Bograma, but once the publishing and marketing houses get wind of what its kit can do it will really take off," said Bamford.

The firm showed its 9,000sph inline CD booklet production line. The unit was shown folding, stitching and trimming 4-up booklets to produce 36,000bph.

Bograma's latest inline die-cutter also drew admiring glances from the 70-plus UK visitors invited to the event. The BS 450 and BS 750 multis can die-cut products up to 4mm thick and knife-cut up to 5mm.

Bograma modules were also shown linked up to H+H kit to produce inline products from small 8pp glued booklets to mini sized 44pp punched booklets.

However, the busiest hall at the event at the event at H+H's headquarters in Bielefeld, Germany was undoubtedly the mailing hall, which demonstrated H+H's newest pick and place technology.

The firm's transfer module for the placement of CDs and DVDs garnered the majority of interest. Traditionally machines use hoppers to feed the disks into the pick and place device, which means that the disk to be placed is pulled from the bottom of the heavy stack, risking scratching the disk above.

The new transfer module uses a vacuum carousel to continuously stock a much smaller stack, which reduces the stress on the disks as they are taken to be placed. "Before this the Achilles heel of any CD/DVD pick and place system was always scratching," said Bamford.

The event was also used to highlight the latest version of MBO's large-format series, the T1420 and T1620. The latest incarnations use an ultra-light carbon slitter shaft, dramatically easing the manual handling during slitter adjustments.

Story by Darryl Danielli