James Belton, operational planning and solutions manager
Using the biggest single-site capacity suite of HP Indigo presses in the country, Harrier LLC, the UK’s largest photobook producer, has installed a Kolbus DA 260 Casemaker and BF 512 Casing machine.
The company is producing a wide range of hospitality, advertising, corporate and family album photobooks in runs upwards from a single copy. To cater for this high volume of short run book production work at consistent high quality the company installed the machines at its Devon plant.
The project started with the company investigating the Kolbus DA 260 as it wanted to address casemaking capacity and quality issues. During the evaluation process, it witnessed European Photobook production and discovered that with the machine, book production equipment productivity improved in speed, quality and a reduction in labour.
In addition to the high standard specification, the machine incorporates a ‘Cross Cut Spine Strip System’, which not only produces individual board spine strips in line but also has the ability to vary the size of the spine automatically, for continuous variable case size production.
The investment was enhanced by also purchasing a highly specified Kolbus BF 512 Casing in line, which produces a full range of cased book styles with fast make ready times and outputs of 30 copies per minute. The capacity of the Harrier bindery has hugely increased to not only allow for the expected further growth in the Photobook market but to allow growth in the Commercial Trade Finishing market.
Greg Bird, Kolbus UK, said, ‘As the worldwide demand for professional quality photobooks has accelerated so Kolbus has become the dominant supplier of bookbinding machinery for this sector of the market. We are pleased that the UK’s biggest producer has joined their ranks.’
