Adelaide packaging producer Streamline Cartons has invested in its first sheetfed offset press, a KBA Rapida 105 for UV print and finishing.
“We currently don’t do any in-house printing at all and to go from nothing to a medium-sized press is a giant step,” Joshua Harris, Streamline’s operations manager, told Print21. “In the past, anything requiring ink on paper has been subbed out to different commercial printers around town while we’ve concentrated on carton design, pre-press and conversion stages.
“But as we’ve been getting busier - with significant growth over the past year – the demand has increased, along with the pressure on our suppliers.
“We were finding that we also needed access to UV print and finishing. In this respect, the configuration of the Rapida 105 we ordered is tailored specifically to the needs of our customers and our existing Bobst finishing equipment.” This included raising the press onto a 450 mm plinth to accommodate higher piles, an enlarged sheet format of 78 x 105 cm, maximised substrate flexibility and facilities for inline quality control with QualiTronic ColorControl.
The new Rapida - with six printing units, inline coating tower and full equipment for UV production - is due to arrive in Adelaide early in February. KBA engineers from Germany will spend about three weeks setting it up and another couple of weeks to train staff.
“We’re hoping to get some sheets off at the end of February or early in March,” says Harris. “We have informed our customers that we will be able to offer direct printing onto microflute board up to 1.6 mm, for example, and that has certainly caught their interest. In the past, this was simply not possible and we had to laminate instead.
“We went for the Fujifilm CtP equipment and we’ve hired more staff with experience in pre-press to deal with all the proofing and layout software.
“The experts from Germany and Dave Lewis from KBA Australasia have been more than helpful in assisting our implementation of in-house print production. They have shown they understand our background and what we want to achieve.”
KBA engineers are also due in Sydney this month to put the finishing touches on a new KBA 145 Rapida large format sheetfed offset press at Centrum Printing’s headquarters in Chipping Norton.
Streamline Cartons, established for more than 20 years, is a carton and packaging manufacturing company based at Cavan in Adelaide that supplies a wide range of products and materials - from single layer, oven safe, foil-backed, litho-laminated and corrugated cartons, in plain or printed styles – to the food, wine and other industries.