Leon Torzyn, the co-owner of South Australia’s Print Junction, made a flurry of equipment purchases during PacPrint with a new Horizon BQ-270V variable perfect binder among them.
The decision to invest in the new Horizon perfect binder, which automatically perfectly binds books of varying thicknesses, has eliminated the need for Print Junction to send work offsite – a move which Torzyn says will save thousands of dollars every year.
Torzyn is a printing industry veteran who started Print Junction with his wife Sheila, a 60 per cent shareholder in the business, and daughter Leah 26 years ago. His son, Nathan Torzyn, also a qualified printer, is now the general manager and is taking on steadily increasing responsibilities of the business.
In 2012 Print Junction became fully certified as an Indigenous business with Supply Nation, due to Sheila’s Indigenous heritage.
Torzyn says adding the new Horizon perfect binder has helped set Print Junction up for the future. The investment completes a Horizon finishing corner in the print room. This includes a collator and creaser/folder – all Horizon and all sourced through Currie Group, the exclusive distributor of the Japanese-made range of finishing equipment in Australia and New Zealand.
What makes the Horizon BQ-270V really stand out is it comes standard with a special book thickness caliper which means that as one book is cycling through the machine, a subsequent book of a different thickness can be measured with the data transferred for the changeover. This feature, depending on the book block thickness, can result in a 30 per cent decrease in cycle time when compared to conventional models.
“For many years now, we have been offering the solution of perfect binding for specialist reports, high-end publications, annual reports, manuals and books of that nature which we do quite a lot of,” Torzyn told Sprinter.
“We have always said to our clients they will get a nice square back perfect-bound book and it will look good but then we would send it to a trade house. This meant getting it out of our factory, sending it to the trade house and falling into their hands and timeframes.
“We should have done this 10 years ago. I am retiring and we’ve got machinery here that are new and up to date and from this point on we are good for 10 years.
“The machine is in now and it has been going for a couple of weeks. We have done a number of jobs on it and the customers are very happy with what we have done.
“The intention is to gather our work and produce it in batches every Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Obviously if jobs are required immediately then we will do them but beyond that we will do it in batches, turn it on, get it up to speed, do the work and then shut it down.
“For our small factory, there are only 10 of us here, it is perfect.
“It is very automated and very easy to operate. We will have three or four people trained up on it and once it is set up it is very simple to run. It fits our model and our production capabilities, and it can produce 350 to 400 books an hour.”
Torzyn is also putting out the call to printers he deals with who may like to utilise the machine, if their own perfect binder breaks down or they don’t have one.
“We work as a backup for a couple of printers so if they have an issue in their pressroom then we help them out. Just recently one of our associates had a problem with his platemaker so we rolled off a couple of hundred of plates for him. We all do that – we all help each other,” Torzyn said.
“We will never become an open trade house but there will be an approach to a handful of printers to say if you haven’t got the facility for perfect binding, then we are happy to help or if yours breaks down we are happy to help you.”
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