Birmingham trade finisher Ace Binding expects return on investment in just a few months after installing two Horizon VAC-1000 collating towers from Intelligent Finishing Systems.

“The towers will have paid for themselves by Christmas,” states director Rob Hart. “We are wire and perfect binding specialists and a number of local businesses have closed down. We were winning more and more work and are entering our busiest time of the year for calendars. We needed help with the increased workload and with collating sets that would have been done by hand or sent through our existing collator twice.”

Mr Hart was clear on his requirements before making the investment: “We didn’t look at anything else. I have been in the industry for nearly 30 years and know and trust Horizon kit. When I saw the whole new system and what its capabilities were I knew it would do the job for us.”

As for the impact it has made on the business he explains: “You can put pretty much any sheet through it now. This gives us a lot more control of what we can do especially as people are specifying a number of different grades. The fact we can do almost anything and everything ensures we have a huge amount of flexibility.

“It has taken a production headache away as well,” states Mr Hart. “We did have a bottleneck when it came to keeping up with the binding but now we are faster and so our turnaround times are quicker.”

The Horizon VAC-1000 features a unique rotary suction feeding system that operates effectively on a wide range of paper stocks at speeds of up to 9,900 sets per hour. There is a high-power double feed detect sensor comprising of high-intensity infrared LED’s at each bin.