Following the cutter’s arrival in October, the team has already used it for a wide variety of substrates, including vinyl, e-flute boxes, paper-over-board, and Dibond, using the machine’s set of sold-as-standard tools.
“It’s early days, but it’s brilliant,” Knockout Print managing director Ian Paull told Printweek.
“It’s a very versatile piece of kit, more versatile than anything we’ve ever had given the amount of things you can do with all the different tools – but bit by bit we are finding our feet with it.”
So far, Paull has had one operator out of Knockout’s five-strong team trained up on the Nexus, who will act as an “anchor man”, helping cross-train the rest of the team.
“We’ve dabbled with much smaller, basic cutting machines – but this is next level,” Paull said.
He added that Vivid had been enormously helpful in setting the team up with the new machine, even doing some cutting for Knockout at the Vivid factory while the company got financing in place.
“We were printing, and sent stuff there to be processed, almost like a finishing service,” Paull explained.
“In doing so, we got to understand how the print side [of expanding into new applications] would work, and allowed us to be quite flexible with our operations – it was really helpful, and a really smart idea on their part.
“We did shop around, obviously, but the price was great and the service has been superb.”
The new cutter has formed the “lynchpin” of Knockout’s expansion into new applications, following the company’s purchase of a secondhand Epson SC-V7000 flatbed printer in 2023, which joined a Mimaki JV300 roll-to-roll printer and a Ricoh Pro C7200 toner press, fitted with white and clear, in the firm’s unit.
“We’re a pretty small factory, but we’ve got some powerful finishing kit, including stitching, semi-automatic wirebinder, and we can do short-run hardbacks. In this game, you need to be able to do everything for everybody to survive,” Paull said.
“This is the key for me: my staff all work hard, and my job is to make sure they all have working equipment that allows them to do a multitude of jobs simultaneously, without fuss. That’s the key, without putting lots of bodies in.
“It’s taken some time, but I think we’ve finally reached that nirvana.”
