The London-based firm has bought two Ricoh Pro C901 digital printers, a BQ-470 Horizon four-clamp perfect binder, bought from Intelligent Finishing Systems, and a Setmaster collator, bought from Col-Tec.
The latest investments follow the firm's purchase of a Duplo DC-745 multi-finisher, which it signed for at Ipex. The machines, which are all new additions to the company's plant list, have been installed at the its premises over the past few months.
The £3.7m-turnover firm is hoping to grow its business by more than 20% to £4.5m within a year with the investments.
The firm also operates an HP Indigo 5500, an HP Indigo 3050, two Océ 6200s, an Océ 2110 and a five-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75 with Anicolor and Inpress Control.
Managing director Adam Frost said: “We’re growing our sales and looking to expand and we put the extra kit in to increase our capacity. We looked at the quality output of the Ricohs and decided that compared to the cost of ownership of another Indigo, the Ricohs made a lot of sense to us.
“The perfect binder is a PUR binder so that gives us added flexibility and a greater service offering to our clients. And we bought the Setmaster to help us in collating signatures so we can perfect bind short-run litho work in-house using the BQ-470. We’ve been able to bring some of the stuff that we were previously outsourcing in-house.”
The firm looked at a range of alternatives before making its decisions including finishing equipment from CP Bourg and Morgana and digital offerings from Konica Minolta, Canon and Xerox.
The Ricoh Pro C901, which handles stocks up to 300gsm in duplex mode, prints at up to 90 A4 ppm and integrates full-colour scanning, copying and document storage to meet image capture and print-on-demand requirements. It features oil-free imaging technology to produce output at "near-offset" quality.
The Horizon BQ-470, which runs at 1,350cph, offers automated set-up through an icon-based touchscreen to produce books up to 65mm thick. It is equipped with two large application rollers for strong, high-quality binds and a separate side glue tank for added flexibility.
“We were completing a lot of digital perfect bound work in-house but sending the litho work out. The real problem for us was that producing litho runs of up to 1,000 was quite expensive and now we can complete that in-house much more cost-effectively,” said Frost.
“We were just not winning the work when we quoted. We have already seen that changing and have started to win those jobs.”
Kube Print, which was founded in 2004, has 32 employees. It produces financial, educational and commercial print and completes some trade work.
