The new circa-£240,000 buckle folder will be installed in mid-May and company director James Baxter said it would unblock the current bottleneck in production.
“The MBO is 16- or 17-years old and so it just can’t keep up with the technology we have in the pressroom. It’ll increase our [folding] productivity by 40-50%, I think,” he said.
The TH 82 will run alongside numerous other devices in the finishing department, including a KH 82 combination Stahlfolder.
It has been specified with the Palamides delivery, which will allow for three-up rather than two-up output. The TH 82 handles sheets of up to 820x1,200mm and stock weights of 40-250gsm and will run on a double day shifts.
Researching which device to buy, Baxter was invited to visit local print firms Micropress and Sudbury Print Group which have the same equipment and, being convinced, he signed with Heidelberg last month.
“Because the nature of print sometimes can be very secretive I was partly not expecting to be let in, to be honest,” said Baxter of visiting the other sites. “But we were a couple of hours at both and definitely not hurried out of the door. It was really nice and very helpful and helped us make our decision.
“Going with Heidelberg made sense because of the other equipment we have - they also made such a big effort with us and were really helpful,” he added.
In its press department, Swallowtail runs a five-colour Speedmaster XL75, which it bought in 2011 when the company was formed through a merger of local businesses Norwich Colour Print and F Crowe & Sons, as well as an XL105-5+L that it bought secondhand in 2014.
The firm, which prints brochures, stationery, newsletters, magazines, greetings cards, books and response print to London and the East England region, also runs two digital devices: a three-year old Ricoh 751 and an 18-month old Konika Minolta C1085.
“Ultimately we want to do as many processes in-house as we can because however good your suppliers are you always lose a bit of control when you have to use them,” Baxter said. “The only things we don’t do in-house that we do a fair amount of is gold foiling and spot UVing,” he explained.
Baxter said that the 56-staff, £5.5m-turnover business tried to have a “continuous cycle of investment” and would be looking at buying a new stitching line next year, for which they had already spoken to other manufacturers including Muller Martini.
“For this year I think we’ll stick with the new folder and see where that takes us. It should release that bottleneck and allow us to take on more sales so that we can continue to grow and push on towards £6m, without having to increase our overheads just now,” said Baxter
“We’ve had a good start to the year and we are positive for the coming months. You never know what’s going to happen these days, everything has been doom and gloom in the news, but that’s certainly not what we’ve seen.”
