The eight-staff firm installed a Blackman & White VersaTech cutter-router in November and will take delivery of a 3.2m-wide Mimaki JV5 printer at the end of this month and a 3.2m-wide Monti Antonio heat press in mid-April.

The Mimaki and Monti Antonio kit will be supplied by I-Sub Digital while the Blackman & White machine was bought direct from the manufacturer. The company had been using a Summa cutter previously, which it has sold on.

“We have a range of printers that can cope with materials up to 3.2m wide, but our previous cutting machine could only cope with materials up to 1.6m so larger jobs had to be hand finished, which is both labour intensive and time consuming,” said director Lee Egan.

“We needed a multi-functional finishing machine that could cope with different materials in widths up to 3.2m. Efficiency wise, going to the wider Blackman & White cutter has been massive for us.”

Using a laser as well as a knife blade, the VersaTech has a nominal cutting area of 3.2m but the cutting bed is conveyorised with a roller feed, which means it can accommodate much longer lengths of fabric materials.

The new kit will join an EFI Vutek GS printer, an HP Latex 360 and two HP DesignJet Z6100s.

“We don’t currently do dye-sub fabric printing so we print all of our fabrics and Foamex on the Vutek. The majority of what we do is backlit fabric, which UV lends itself to,” said Egan.

“We’ve now bought the full system for dye-sub printing with the Mimaki JV5 that’s coming in as well as the Monti Antonio heat press.”

Established in 2010 by Egan and fellow director Andrew Lambert, circa-£700,000 turnover Manchester Print Services specialises in POS and exhibition and display printing.

Having started off in a 93sqm unit, the firm has gradually grown since and purchased a new 836sqm facility in late 2016.