After spotting a gap in the market for high quality finishing Michael Irving decided to set up his own trade service with investment in a Horizon BQ-470 four clamp perfect binder and a Horizon HT-30C three side trimmer from IFS.
As well as perfect binding and trimming, The PURfect Binding Company, Leeds, offers a range of services including stitch fold & trim, cutting and creasing, punching and Wiro binding.
Irving explains: “I could see there was a need for a high quality dedicated trade finishing service and decided to go out on my own. In particular there is demand for quick response PUR binding. No-one else in the area seemed to be offering the service for short run digital print.”
An experienced finisher, Irving continues: “With digital print there is often a lot of toner and oil-based ingredients on the paper and that can make achieving a strong bind difficult. PUR takes that problem away. It gives a lay flat property similar to sewn work, and a super strong bond, which is impervious to heat extending the life of the product and quality.
As for choosing Horizon he says: “I have run some Horizon equipment before and always found it to be reliable robust and able to produce high quality results. All the systems are easy to use which means staff can move around them and confidently complete high-quality work. They are also very quick to set up which is essential when handling a lot of short run fast turnaround work.
“The systems were also the highest spec options out there. The quality is right too, and that is the main thing for me.”
The Horizon BQ-470 is ideally suited to mid-range soft back book production with higher production speeds, instant make readies for runs-of-one. It can bind up to 65 mm (2.55”) thickness and offers fully automated set-up through an intuitive icon-based LCD touchscreen.
The Horizon HT-30C three-side trimmer features automated job set-ups and quick changeovers with the ability to store up to 40 different book jobs in memory. It operates off-line to trim perfect bound books at speeds up to 500 cycles per hour. A colour touch screen allows all set-ups to be performed with full automation.
Irving concludes: “We are big enough to cope and small enough to care and are looking forward to building up a broad customers base supported by these productive systems.”
