Finishing & Screen Printing

A stitch in time for Quentin Press

Friday 31. July 2009 - Quentin Press in Burgess Hill is bringing saddle-stitching in house with a debut Stitchmaster ST 100 machine from Heidelberg.

Works director Greg Priest explains: “In terms of prioritising jobs, maintaining quality control and keeping added value production in house it made sense for us to invest in our own saddle-stitching.

“We looked at machines from Horizon, Muller Martini and Heidelberg but the Stitchmaster was the right match for our requirements. We were also hugely impressed by the number of engineers, availability of spare parts and overall speed of response that Heidelberg can provide.”

Quentin Press uses non-Heidelberg presses so it was not inevitable that it would buy its finishing equipment from Heidelberg.

Commercial colour work including prospectuses, brochures and other promotional material is handled by the company for councils, colleges and commercial buyers in London, Brighton and a swathe of southern England.

The range of stocks it handles is broad and it liked the transport system on the ST 100 which enables work to travel mark-free through to the stitching heads. A stacker on the end automates delivery and can stack and turn to whatever pile height is required, eliminating the need for manual offloading of shingle-delivered booklets.

Quentin Press already has Polar cutting technology and now with cut-fold-stitch in house it offers a comprehensive production portfolio. Perfect binding, laminating and other specialist work will continue to be outsourced, however.

The ST 100 has now been delivered to the company and is running on flexible day shifts. Quentin Press is part of the Gemini Group.