From offset to digital: a printer’s journey - Print 21 magazine feature

Doug Affleck is a printer reborn; the long-term offset craftsman of over 20 years experience is now working in a world where there is no ink or solvent. Those smells are long gone. His printing premises are his home garage, and he no longer wears a blue overall. He is now the complete digital printer for Digital Books on Demand. He talks about the transformation with Cameron Boggs.

Printing Creations, Affleck’s prior company, also started out of the garage of his old Central Coast home back in 1991. It then moved to Mount Ku-Ring-Gai where it remained for 20 years. The successful offset printing business revolved around a Shinohara 66 four-colour sheetfed press with perfector as the primary machine. Rounding out the business was a collection of folding and stitching machines, guillotines and CTP facilities.

The print floor held nine staff, running two shifts. The fully-automated Shinohara press was able to turn out a lot of print for the company when used in this fashion. As the owner, managing director, sales person and CTP operator at Printing Creations, Affleck made known his preference for a hands-on approach.

“As soon as you sit in your ivory tower you never see how the factory works or see where it’s not working well. Working at ground level you are more approachable by staff. They enjoy seeing you get your hands dirty, compared to a boss sitting in an office wearing a suit and tie,” he explains.

Last year, Affleck (pictured) sold the business to Kingsgrove-based Masterprint, transferring all equipment and all but one staff member over the next few days to their new premises. The remaining staff member chose to remain on a casual basis at Affleck’s request: “I just asked and she said yes,” he says.

“We negotiated in the deal that we were allowed to remain in contact with just three clients, so we are basically starting from scratch again.”

Digital road to Damascus

When he sold Printing Creations last December, Affleck immediately ordered a Ricoh Pro C901 digital press the very next day with installation completed on 23 December.

He had been researching digital presses from all the major suppliers for two years but was never quite happy with what was on offer at that point in time. It wasn’t until November last year that he decided the offset printing game was no longer fun as there was no margin to be made. Market forces changed Printing Creations, according to Affleck, as its diverse clientele began to ask for lower print runs as well as lower prices.

With the industry shifting and print volumes coming off enormously, Affleck found what he was producing through a large offset operation could be achieved with just as good quality and speed on a digital press. Because the runs were also getting shorter, he found that digital was better able to meet the lower price point the market was after.

Much of the work from the offset business was with books and brochures. Affleck knew enough about this market and the industry to be able to start again in digital. Again he began by working from home, as he felt that, previously, he had spent too much time at work and wanted more time with the family.

“The beauty of running a business from your home is that if I wanted to move over to the northern beaches, I’ve only got to put the equipment on the back of a truck and I can move over there. I don’t even have to get the cranes in. I am a portable business and can move anywhere, requiring little space.”

Ricoh survives the test

When Affleck decided to make the move into digital, he called Ricoh requesting a 6am meeting at their showroom. When he turned up, all of Ricoh’s technical staff were ready to prove what the C901 could do. Impressed but unfazed, Affleck proceeded with his shooting match and threw everything an offset printer could do and more at the machine.

Taking the digital press through its paces, he made sure all the worst possible papers were fed through, papers that had been sitting around in open packets for weeks or months at a time. As he tells it, “the printer just ran”.

Since installation of the machine, Affleck says he has never had to wait longer than half an hour for a service call from one of Ricoh’s engineers, and they don’t leave until it’s fixed.

“The machine itself is a fair price, the engineers are very easy to work with and turn up on time, every time. It has never given me cause for grief and we have done almost half a million prints on it so far,” he says.

During the time Print21 was at Digital Books on Demand, Ricoh engineer, Peter Harb, was working on the C901. Affleck had found the booklet maker required a bit of tweaking to make it work better for his business.

“I spoke to Kathy Wilson [general manager, business solutions and production at Ricoh] last night as I had a couple of ideas on the way the system could flow better and so Peter turns up here this morning to work on some modifications to make the bookbinder run faster. We will now be able to produce more books per hour with easier operation,” he explains.

“So long as you are trying to work within specifications, Ricoh are happy to change a few things and move rollers around to make the machine work better.”

Affleck says he finds Kathy Wilson to be very approachable and that it proved very easy for him to get to the top of the phone ladder in order to speak to Ricoh’s general manager.

“I have had a couple of potential Ricoh clients come around to see the machines run. In a lot of cases, suppliers will set up a demo in an office environment with the sales person. But at the end of the day printers just want to see the machine in a production environment, running real jobs. I invite anyone to come round and have a look.”

Paper in, books out

Working at the finishing end of the C901 is a GBC 620os one-sided laminating system to celloglaze books and brochures and a GBC DB280 perfect binder. The C901 prints and hot glues books up to 400 pages with cover and three-sided trim.

“The Ricoh 901 is the only machine on the market that can do a 300gsm cover with a celloglaze and bind it all inline. Running 310gsm high bulk artboard as our covers, the Ricoh is the only machine that could duplex a heavyweight board without any loss of speed,” says Affleck.

He maintains that so long as you are reasonably computer literate anyone can operate the C901 digital press. Affleck’s 12- and 14-year-old daughters can run the machine, while his 8-year-old son takes books off the booklet maker, counts them and stacks them in boxes.

One of the first jobs Affleck ran off the C901, a Leonard Choice music festival photobook, will be submitted to the national digital print awards. The job in total included 500 copies of 240 full colour pages, printed and shipped within three days. Two books were printed and bound every 15 minutes.

Affleck’s says his next business move will be to head away from black and white output and add another C901 to his operation.