The success of CostCo and Aldi says one thing: Aussies like a bargain. Running a print business doesn’t come cheap, and while printers are used 

to shelling out the kinds of eye-watering sums that would make normal folk wince, they certainly aren’t averse to making a saving.

With the Aussie dollar rising fast enough to give exporters the bends, capital investments of some foreign-made machinery don’t require such deep pockets. The best place to start looking for a bargain buy is in the bindery. For printers used to counting investments in the hundreds of thousands, the idea of a technology boost for under $50,000 should be music to their ears.

Bringing finishing in-house can free small print businesses from the downsides of outsourcing: delays in turnarounds and jobs not finished to spec. Trade binderies are great for larger or more complex jobs, but many are tempted by the ease and convenience of doing it in-house – they just need the right equipment.

For printers dipping a tentative toe in the post-press waters, there’s a school of thought that says forget the bells and whistles and focus on no-nonsense entry-level gear. Looking at products on offer from many well-known machinery vendors shows this kind of technology is in plentiful supply in Australia.

The mindset of “it has to be German” is fading, says Neil Southerington, managing director of Graffica.

This is especially true for older, more straightforward technol-ogies, such as guillotining. In the $30,000 to $50,000 bracket, for example, Graffica offers Taiwanese-made diecutters from SPL and SAFM film laminators from mainland China.

But Southerington issues a caveat: when shopping for budget bindery equipment, go through a reputable Australian dealer to ensure quality and Australian compat-ibility. It might add a few thousand to the price, but is well worth it.

It’s not just iPods, Nikes and Rolexes being churned out of bootleg manufac-turing plants in Asia. There’s a steady market for counterfeit printing kit too.

“China is a minefield, as there is rampant copying. You’ve got to know the market. There’s good stuff but you’ve got to be careful,” says Southerington.

Online sales come with a common snare. Shopping on the internet might come with the promise of a $5,000 saving on a $40,000 bindery purchase. But payment is usually 100% with the order, leaving the purchaser with no fallback if the machinery fails, not to mention installation and service, which have to be arranged separately.

“Even when visiting a show in China, don’t fall for ‘it’s the same machine as at Ipex’. The product will work, of course, but just how long will that no-name guillotine last? How robust is the drive and clutch, how strong is the cutting pressure? Was it manufactured in a factory using CNC drilling equipment or in a garage with a hand drill? And when you negotiate, beware of what’s being offered for a new, lower price. You might have saved $2,000, but, for example, the machine arrives without guards,” says Southerington.

“I recently sold a laminator in the $40,000 region. The customer could have bought a similar machine over the internet for about $25,000. He chose to buy from me because he knew of somebody who’d bought one online – it looked the same but he had to spend several thousand with an engineer to replace a rubber roller with a steel roller because it was oozing glue onto the floor. I survive as a business in this internet age because online buyers are discovering some real pitfalls.”

Cut-price cutting

Ferrostaal Australia offers a range of cost-effective bindery gear. There’s the $12,990 Morgana DigiCreaser (1), which handles automatic creasing for bookcovers and photobooks. Or there’s the $34,750 Titan 265 guillotine (2), with hydraulic cutting and clamping of up to 26 cuts per minute up to a 673mm width.

But the winner is the Morgana DigiFold Pro. Andy Cooper, general manager, digital finishing, at Morgana Australia, describes it as “the most popular product in the range this year”. At $39,500, it creases and folds – without toner cracking – at up to 6,000 sheets per hour.

“It removes the need for printers to outsource creasing and folding and increases profitability and business efficiency. Importantly, it does not need a skilled operator,” says Cooper.

Pressnet’s budget range offers productivity. At $29,900, its New Star YFMA 520 celloglazer is an oil heated, auto feeding and auto sheeting celloglazer. It takes work from 760x540mm to 297x210mm size, and comes with a PLC touchscreen control .

Pressnet managing director Charlie Scandrett says this outlay will also buy a New Star SGUV 520 flood coater, a stream-fed automatic UV coater from 760x540mm down to 297x210mm.

“It’s ideal for digital printers to give lift to short colour runs and for lifting book covers, posters and point-of-sale material. The machine needs to be washed only once a month and can be placed on standby for rapid embellishing of short-run products.”

Jasco offers the Ideal DigiCut hydraulic guillotine, a programmable power cutter with hydraulic clamp for trimming digital print jobs. It features infinitely adjustable clamp pressure for cutting sensitive, fragile or heavy papers, and has a practical foot pedal which is used as a mechanical cutting indicator or for pre-clamping when trimming bound brochures.

Jasco product manager Massimo Ioppolo says the flexibility and features
of the Ideal 5222 DigiCut (3) “make it one of the most popular models in the Ideal guillotine range”.

Premiering at PrintEx11, an Uchida AeroCut (4) cutter-creaser, for about $35,000, has a touchscreen for rapid operation in cutting, slitting, creasing
and perforating.

“AeroCut makes it possible for job changes to be completed in seconds and easily produce work such as business cards, leaflets, postcards, and greeting cards,” says Ioppolo.

Over at GBC, there’s a laminator for less than $25,000 that is proving a crowd-pleaser. GBC marketing executive Tim Hawes says the company has just sold the 101st 620 OS single-sided laminator (5) in Australia. The $24,500 device has a pneumatic pressure system to provide high-quality adhesion to stocks and an optional automatic feeder reduces labour costs, improving productivity.

Add a few more dollars and there’s the $35,000 Touchline CF-375 automatic creaser/folder, shown at PrintEx11 and launched in August. It features single-pass creasing and folding, and smooth, no-cracks handling of digital prints up to 400gsm (see Product of the Month p52).

At $38,000, there is the Duplo Digital 120 System bookletmaker, an entry-level modular saddlestitcher that GBC says has sold well over the past seven years.

Renz Australia managing director Rod Fowler sees the rapid pace of change creating the need for new products and performance criteria in finishing solutions. “The requirement now is for a smaller footprint without the need for a high level of operator skill. Equipment must be fast and easy to set up, while providing a level of automation and productivity that can turn around jobs quickly and reliably.”

The vendor specialises in punch, binding and plastic spiral technologies, and Fowler recommends a number of combinations. For example, combining a Renz DTP 340A semi-automatic punch, WP 300 automatic wire dispenser and ECL 360 electric wire closer will deliver production speeds of up to 400 books per hour for a $17,000 package.

Combining the DTP 340A and a Mobi 360 automatic wire binder will deliver up to 800 bound books per hour for a $38,000 spend. Combining a 340A and Renz APSI compact spiral inserter is a rapid, simple solution for punching and binding with plastic spiral, packaged at $25,000. All packages include a free punching die.

Dollar dazzlers

Some cut-price wonders at PrintEx11 were on the stand of Graph-Pak division, Bermuda. Graph Pak managing director Tom Ralph points to the Bermuda UV350/530 coaters (6), priced at $6,500, the 450BPS A2 guillotine (7), for $8,500, and the 320BPS perfect binder (8) with side gluing and creasing, for $8,000. More than 30 have been sold since PrintEx11, says Ralph. “The machines have a short footprint, are easy to operate, are low maintenance, and have a low price point.”

Looking to Asia is an obvious way to find a cheap price. While Chinese-made printing equipment is still looked on with some scepticism, there’s no doubt the manufacturing level has advanced at light speed over recent years.

But that’s not to say you can’t find a deal out of Europe. Brian Evans, Heidelberg ANZ’s post-press product manager, says his company has recorded strong market interest for two of its Polar cutters. The 660mm Polar 66 sells for $24,500 while the 800mm Polar 80 goes for $35,000. He says both are versatile enough to straddle the digital-offset divide, with features such as memory capacity for program storage, touchscreens, and full hydraulics for quiet operation in idle mode.

How would you spend $50,000 in the bindery?

Mauro Mattarucco, managing director, Print Bound

As part of Print Bound’s venture into digital printing, the need for small bindery items became apparent. One such item was the requirement for a small guillotine. We purchased a Horizon AFC 61-II guillotine for just over $30,000. The small Horizon plays a vital role and is an integral part of our digital production. It is programmable, accurate, durable and simple to operate.

Mark Orel, executive director, Finsbury Green

We bought a Polar 60 cutter from Heidelberg at the beginning of this year for the launch of our digital printing and finishing department. We’re using it exclusively for cutting digital print from our Kodak NexPress. The guillotine arrived at the same time as the NexPress. Polar is a trusted brand and part of a family of Polars we have, including a 92, two 115s (with Transomat paper transport system), and a 137. You can adapt offset finishing equipment to finish digital print, but for us, it was a case of keeping the digital finishing gear in close proximity to the digital printing, all within the new division.

Mason Thomas, manager, Print City

A Plockmatic 60 hand saddlestitcher staples and folds our more straightforward jobs. It’s a fairly simple machine but ideal for financial reports when we mix colour and black-and-white pages. Our recently purchased Xerox 800, the smaller version of the 1000, has inline saddlestitching we used to do on the hand machine. And one of our black-and-whites has a bookletmaker on it too. So the Plockmatic’s doing around 20% of the work it did five years ago. But it still gets some use because the inline digital gear, particularly the bookletmaker on the mono machine, does not like handling some of the cover weights, and we use it for large books and hand-scoring.

Bruce Neyland, co-managing director, Keima Press

Our Horizon collater-stitcher-trimmer was bought some years ago for around $35,000. Our book printing work is guillotined, then collated, stitched, folded and trimmed by the Horizon. We used it every two months on a 28pp newsletter of 15,000 impressions. On slightly higher volumes, we fold into eight-page sections, and run it through a stitcher-trimmer. And then you get to a point, with much larger jobs, where it’s just cheaper to send it to a trade bindery.

Malcolm Gasper, co-managing director, Jagar Sprinting

I’m interested in a Wirebinder 360, an Italian-made double-loop wire-binding machine, which I’m trying to source through Rilecart. The semi-automatic machine was at PrintEx. It’s a mid-sized model, priced around $40,000, that fills a gap in the local marketplace. Smaller wiro-binders are manual and larger ones are aimed more at finishing houses. This machine allows you to pile in documents and works without close supervision. The only other product like it is a Xerox DocuPunch but it won’t take the tabs in with the document. Xerox has a bigger model that will take in tabs, but then it’s too expensive and too large again.

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