The company opted for Bottcher rollers after the installation of their latest press, a two-colour Sakurai and the difficulties they had when the rollers that the refurbished press came with didn’t last.

Production manger Alan Buckley says that while the Bottcher rollers were slightly more expensive than the ones they had been importing directly from Australia, the control they subsequently had over the ink/water balance was so marked that the press “became a different machine overnight.”

“They worked so well that we decided to put them in all our machines, and we’ve found that if you look after them with the recommended washes, the rollers are outlasting anything we had previously,” he says.

“We’ve had no wash-outs on any of the presses and we’ve found that we’re now achieving the ink/water balance within a few sheets, and the balance is constant with these new rollers across all our presses. The rollers are well worth the money we’ve spent on them.”
General manger Sean Donnelly, who set up Precise Print 15 years ago, says they wouldn’t use anything else now.

“We were really in crisis and we had heaps of work at the time. There are so many variables in printing and to survive in business you have to deal with as many as possible. Now we have the consistency we need and production has improved dramatically.”

Precise Print employs a staff of 18 and provides most of the pre-press, printing and finishing in-house including design, die cutting, collating, folding, stitching and plate making. It largely services the Wellington business printing and upper-jobbing market with leaflets, magazines, brochures and corporate stationery.

Andrew Wilkinson, national technical manager of Nova Inks & Chemicals, the New Zealand distributor for Bottcher rollers, says Bottcher is the largest roller manufacturer in the world and has its own rubber plant at Geldsdorf in West Germany.

Their rollers, specially designed for sheet offset dampening units, ensure that the ink/water balance is achieved as quickly as possible at the start of printing and after stoppages to minimise waste. The rubber compounds used are extremely water friendly which gives controlled fountain solution transfer guaranteeing a wide dampening range, he says.

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