Swindon general commercial printer RHL Print has brought perfect binding in-house with an Intelligent Finishing Systems-supplied Horizon BQ470.

The four-clamp perfect binder was chosen after a careful cost evaluation exercise and the expansion of the sales team at the start of the year.

Wayne Rumbold, Managing Director, explains: “To send jobs to our nearest PUR perfect binding supplier involved a 100-mile round trip. With runs getting smaller and smaller, very often getting jobs finished was costing more than the print job in the first place. So, over the past two years, we looked at how cost effective it would be to invest in a perfect binder.

“We have a lot of experience with Horizon solutions. We like how they operate. They are reliable. We also like IFS and know we can trust them. All this made choosing the Horizon BQ470 easy. We also chose the four-clamp system because we could see it would be the best way to manage the volume of work we were handling as well as the enquiries we were receiving.”

The Horizon BQ-470 four clamp perfect binder 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.

RHL Print, which runs a Komori LS29 four-colour plus coater litho press and Xerox digital presses, has seen the investment lift demand. Holland says: “The binder has had a knock-on effect throughout the business. The press is busier, so we are making more plates and handling more folding. We are running more digital jobs, too.”

He continues: “We are also winning more work as we can now deliver a wider range of jobs, more cost effectively, to our existing customers. Our production is more joined up, fast and cost effective as well. We are more competitive.”