The gluer is due to be installed next week and will be up and running by December. It retails at around £100,000 but ITS managing director Ian Gudgeon said he “got a good deal on it” after flying out to the Florence offices of Italian supplier Francesco Sorbera.
Gudgeon said ITS’ Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire premises will be used as an ad hoc beta test site for the machine.
The spend on the gluer is part of a wider investment strategy for ITS since it took over the premises of one of its key suppliers, Clearview POS, which went into administration around 18 months ago.
Since then it has spent more than £1m on various items of kit and upgrades to its premises. The new kit purchased in the period includes a Cauhe platen, Rabolini platen, Lamina mounter and Wohlenberg guillotine. It has also doubled the size of its existing premises, from 1,110sqm to 2,220sqm, and added another 1,110sqm unit next door.
Gudgeon said he is now considering purchasing an HP Indigo 10000 Digital Press but wanted to get 2016 Q4 out of the way first.
“I did a bit of research on the options and stumbled across this in Florence and was so impressed with the machine that I had it delivered almost straight away,” he said.
“It is basically a slightly quicker, bigger version of our Bickers gluer. It does hotmelt glue as well as cold glues, standard lines, and is programmed with a tablet so I could pull over on a motorway with the remote software and programme it to start glueing.
“Sorbera has been going for 35 years and was pretty giddy because it was his dad’s ambition to get something in the UK. The machine is a better model than the competition but they never had a salesperson in the UK, so we are going to be a sort of beta site.”
The gluer joins ITS’ current Bickers gluer, purchased around a year ago. It glues at around 2.8m/s and has a 10-year unlimited warranty on the glue head and the glue hose.
£5m-turnover ITS, which comprises two companies, ITS Interactive POS and ITS UK, employs 35 staff, 10 of which are on flexible contracts. It mainly obtains jobs from print management companies and design agencies in the corrugated 3D market.
It runs a number of other items for finishing, along with a five-colour KBA Rapida 162 large-format press and a Fuji Serifast screen printer.
“We’re expanding quite rapidly, which is good. The last two months have been ridiculously busy but next year I don’t know what’s going to happen,” added Gudgeon.
“If it does go quiet next year for a couple of months we have a lot of staff on flexi-hour contracts so we might not be making money but we won’t be losing."
