Printing company uses Heidelberg’s CutStar, which lets the company use less expensive roll-paper for jobs typically requiring sheets.
Boyd Brothers, a family-run print shop in Panama City, Fla., was looking
for a way to cut paper costs on projects that usually ended up requiring an
expensive sheet-fed press and paper.
The company decided to implement Heidelberg’s CutStar, and since
installing the system in June 2002, it has posted a 20% increase in annual gross
sales.
Jim Boyd, Jr., president of Boyd Brothers, said that the CutStar lets him
buy paper in rolls, as opposed to sheets, resulting in substantial savings and
enabling the firm to be more competitive on price.
"A lot of the jobs we take in now are based on lower pricing because we
have been able to save so much by purchasing our paper on rolls," Boyd said.
"Adding the CutStar to our shop has enabled us to grow our business."
The CutStar allows reel stock paper to be processed on Heidelberg SM/CD
102 presses. The paper web is fed to the cutting unit via dancer rollers and cut
to any required format between 40 and 72 cm. Once the cutting process is
finished, the CutStar sends the sheet to a shingling unit, where the rear edge
of the sheet is lifted so that the following sheet can slip into the resulting
gap. The stream of shingled stock is then sent to the forwarding rollers in the
feeder.
The main advantage of the CutStar is the lower cost of reel paper
compared to sheeted paper. "It’s a real savings, especially with foils and
special printing stock," Boyd said. "Because of the variable cutoff length, only
the format actually required is cut from the reel paper. That’s a big advantage
over standardized sheet stock." It also lets him do longer press runs than a
typical sheet-fed press, which is another key advantage, he
said.
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