Peter Cooper, director

Ripping Image, a litho and digital printer, has invested in Fastbind binding, casemaking, perfect binding and laminating equipment from Ashgate Automation to add value to its products.

Two years ago, the company diversified into digital printing with a Ricoh C901 printer, which operates alongside a Heidelberg six colour B2 litho press. ‘These two printers are complementary. We can print a generic cover for a brochure then digitally print the text with variable data and still be competitive at very short run lengths as we are doing everything in-house.’ said Peter Cooper, director. 

‘We needed to do something to differentiate ourselves and to create value in our digital printing operation. The Fastbind equipment is perfect for one-off or very short run hard and soft back books, cases, proposals and presentations.

‘We realised that it could open a lot of doors with new and existing clients. We wanted to show them what we could do for them; how we could add quality and make their proposals, presentations, short run books and dissertations come alive,’ Mr Cooper continued.
 

The new equipment installed at the facility included a CaseMatic H46Pro large format casemaker, a Booxter Trio semi-automatic staple binder, an Elite XT large format perfect binder, a Lamiart 470 case pressing machine, a Matrix Duo 650 roll laminator, a Maxit board glueing system and a Presso thermal groove press, which improves the quality of hardcover spines. 



One of the big advantages of the Fastbind equipment is that there is no waste. It also has low set up times. The Booxter is good for both soft and hardback books with spine widths up to 8 mm. It can even staple bind a diverse range of substrates in the same book, which would be impossible using a perfect binder.

The company is also pleased with the ancillary equipment and has also bought an A1 inkjet printer, so that they can print the paper over board covers, which are made on the CaseMatic.

‘The Fastbind kit is exceptional value and if you are prepared to put in the creative effort, it is amazing what can be achieved with it. We can now reproduce things that in the past we would have said, well that’s clever, how did they do that? Mr Cooper added.