Stocksigns, a specialist in health and safety signs, has upgraded its main production flatbed press directly by replacing a SwissQprint Impala of the first generation with a model of the fourth generation.
Stocksigns’ new press was delivered to them on 9 May, and it was already running a few days later. It will allow Stocksigns both to speed up its production while reducing their electricity consumption.
The Impala 4 was SwissQprint UK’s 100th installation in the country.
While the press may be the great-great-grandchild of Stocksign’s old Impala, which had been installed in 2010 as the 15th SwissQprint in the UK, the decision was no foregone conclusion, according to production director David Cload.
He told Printweek: “We spent about six months researching, and looking around. We ended up doing site visits for three other machines, and doing test runs, looking at support packages – everything from power consumption through to response time.
“But the most important criterion was reliability.”
Cload said that Stocksigns has only had three breakdowns in 12 years of using the Impala 1.
Finding a printer with similar reliability, therefore, had been a priority: “Having a single point of failure [for flatbed printing] is not a good problem to have,” Cload explained.
“It’s been an interesting process, looking into the market and understanding what’s best for our business, and the SwissQ came out on top again,” he said.
Stocksigns has seen a huge energy savings with the new press. It is equipped with LED UV curing instead of halogen. The company is also looking into ways to reduce its emissions as part its ESG strategy.
The old impala’s lamps were “incredibly power hungry,” Cload said, and the machine made up 8-10% of the £3m turnover company’s power consumption.
This will help cut down on power costs as well, since the new press only uses 2.2 kWh. SwissQprint’s third-generation solvent and VOC-free inks likewise attracted Stocksigns to the machine.
Installation was not complication-free, considering the size of the 2.5 x 2m flatbed press – Stocksigns had to knock down a wall in its digital studio to get the press into its production site – but the press was printing test runs the afternoon of its arrival.