The device, which was bought from Terry Cooper Services (TCS), was installed at the London-based firm’s premises in November.
It matches the output speed of a BQ-470 Horizon four-clamp PUR perfect binder, which the company also recently purchased alongside two Ricoh Pro C901 digital printers, a Setmaster collator and a Duplo DC-745 multi-finisher.
Kube Print managing director Adam Frost said: “We are seeing a greater demand for faster turnaround short-run digital perfect bound-books. At the same time we are being asked to produce more and more PUR-bound jobs, both digital and short-run litho.
“The new binder means we now are able to do this in-house, but there was no point being able to bind the work faster if it was then delayed waiting to be trimmed.”
The CMT-330, which runs offline with a book loader and vertical delivery, is designed for on-demand printing and features full digital control of the trimming process.
Servo motors control all adjustments normally made by hand with a traditional trimmer. For repeat jobs, the machine offers job memory storage of up to 99 book-trimming jobs.
It also features an eight-station cooling tower for inline systems, a serial communication port for remote set-up and control for fully automated bookshop environments, custom-designed edge guard-shields for the knife, easily accessible blade and infrared sensors monitoring each waste bin.
The business looked at a range of alternatives but decided the CMT-330 best suited its production needs.
“It produces a high-quality result, has a small footprint and its speed is impressive. It can also reliably feed books up to a 50mm spine automatically and was a very cost-effective choice for us,” said Frost.
“Build quality was important too and as TCS has supplied a number of other machines to us over the years we know and trust their performance. It helps us increase our production capacity because we no longer have bottlenecks on the guillotines, which have been freed to do other things.
“We now no longer need to wait for the guillotine and the fact it is a one-person job means we can use staff in other areas of the bindery, ensuring smoother, more effective throughput.”
The company also operates an HP Indigo 5500, an HP Indigo 3050, two Canon Océ 6200s, an Océ 2110 and a five-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75 with Anicolor and Inpress Control.
Kube Print, which was founded in 2004, has 32 employees. It produces financial, educational and commercial print and completes some trade work. The £3.7m-turnover firm is hoping to grow its business by more than 20% to £4.5m within a year as a result of its investment drive.
