John Brailsford Printers has become the first UK company to install a Morgana ColorCut SC6000 digital die-cutting and creasing machine.

The £6,499 device, which was debuted at Hunkeler Innovationdays in Lucerne, Switzerland earlier this year, uses no physical cutting dies. It is targeted at those requiring an affordable, high-capacity device that can cut unattended, and is suitable for the production of labels, stickers, display materials, and short-run packaging work.

The machine was picked by the 12-staff Rotherham business after a review of various products on the market and installed in early May.

Company owner John Brailsford said: “We had looked at a variety of potential solutions, but nothing was quite suited to our needs. Either they were too expensive, were overly complex, or they still needed dies to be produced.

“The previous Intec machine, the SC5000, was close but not quite large enough to handle the range of stock that we needed to process. We thought we were just going to have to stick to outsourcing any work that required die-cutting.

“We could see that digital die-cutting was definitely the way to go – then we had a call from Ray Hillhouse of Morgana, who said to me, ‘I’ve got just the machine for you!’ We have a long history of working both with Ray and with Morgana. He knows us well, and he knew exactly what we needed – and the SC6000 was introduced to us.”

The machine blends flatbed and sheetfed technologies, with a maximum working area of 340x710mm.

“This machine is quite amazing. The results have been quite superb. We keep thinking up new ways of using it – with labels, for example, we are now running through our stock of pre-cut labels, and then we can simply use the SC6000 to kiss-cut the labels for us on plain adhesive-backed stock,” said Brailsford.

“That means any sized, or shaped, self-adhesive label is possible, and we don’t need to have the expense of holding any stock of various sized at all.”

He added: “Another area where we realised that the machine could help us: dividers. We produce these for a number of customers. Dividers to go into workbooks or educational folders. We can have the SC6000 cut out the card for the tab, and even cut the holes for the binders at the same time. It’s not necessarily faster, but we can set the machine to produce these dividers and it will just run, while the operator gets on with other jobs.”

The investment will enable the business to bring work in-house including short-run boxes, pocket folders, and various other cutouts.

“That kind of work has definitely been on the increase, so this really was the right time for us to bring such tasks in-house – it’s going to cut our outwork bill significantly, and therefore will pay for itself in no time,” said Brailsford.

John Brailsford Printers also runs two Presstek DI Digital Offset Presses, a 34 and 52, as well as Xerox digital printing equipment.

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