The new press, which was delivered on 9 May and was running days later, will help Stocksigns to ramp up production speed and save significantly on its electricity consumption at the same time.
The Impala 4 was SwissQprint UK’s 100th installation in the country.
While the press may be the great-great-grandchild of Stocksign’s old Impala, which had been installed in 2010 as the 15th SwissQprint in the UK, the decision was no foregone conclusion, according to production director David Cload.
He told Printweek: “We spent about six months researching, and looking around. We ended up doing site visits for three other machines, and doing test runs, looking at support packages – everything from power consumption through to response time.
“But the most important criterion was reliability.”
Cload added that in the 12 years Stocksigns had used the Impala 1, it had broken down just three times.
Finding a printer with similar reliability, therefore, had been a priority: “Having a single point of failure [for flatbed printing] is not a good problem to have,” Cload explained.
“It’s been an interesting process, looking into the market and understanding what’s best for our business, and the SwissQ came out on top again,” he said.
The new press, equipped with LED UV curing rather than halogen, has provided a massive energy saving for Stocksigns, which is looking at how it can cut its emissions to net-zero as part of its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy.
The old impala’s lamps were “incredibly power hungry,” Cload said, and the machine made up 8-10% of the £3m turnover company’s power consumption.
Given the increase in energy costs since the war in Ukraine, this will likewise help to cut power costs significantly, as the new press uses just 2.2 kWh. SwissQprint’s third-generation solvent and VOC-free inks likewise attracted Stocksigns to the machine.
Installation was not complication-free, considering the size of the 2.5 x 2m flatbed press – Stocksigns had to knock down a wall in its digital studio to get the press into its production site – but the press was printing test runs the afternoon of its arrival.
