Welcome To The Litho Presses

For long-run orders, lithographic presses still hold the title for printing efficiency. Etched aluminium plates from our Computer to Press (CtP) studio are coated with ink over and over again to produce thousands of copies for you.

The key to keeping our litho stream as efficient as possible is in ganging up jobs. Depending on size, we can group 10 to 20 pieces of artwork on one plate. So our workflow software carefully monitors the orders on our system to find compatible jobs that make the most economical use of our resources.

This stream is largely responsible for long-run orders of flat and folded items including; flat flyers, folded leaflets, posters, and business stationery. We also occasionally use our Heidelberg team to produce long-run booklet inners and some unfinished sheets.

Scroll down to find out more about each individual litho press.

Tools > Our Factory > Litho Presses

HEIDELBERG SPEEDMASTER XL 106 (X2)

We are committed to filling our factory with the best and the Speedmaster XL 106 is king of litho efficiency. Our production team broke several internal records when it was first installed, back in 2017. So we went ahead and bought another in 2019 to break even more!

The main detraction from litho production is the time spent making ready for new jobs but that isn’t an issue for the XL 106. As a Speedmaster, it is one of the first litho presses capable of changing jobs fully automated. In fact, Heidelberg claim it takes less than three minutes for the XL 106 to print the last sheet in one run and starting the first good sheet in another.

HEIDELBERG SPEEDMASTER SX 102

Reliable and efficient, the Speedmaster SX 102 is a highly dependable press for commercial printing. At top capacity, the SX 102 can produce up to 14,000 sheets per hour and its several automated features mean minimal time is wasted between jobs.

All of our B1 Heidelbergs, the SX 102 and the two XL 106s, use CutStar feeders. With a CutStar, a reel of paper is fed into the press and then cut into individual sheets before ink is applied. This means we can combine the cost-effectiveness of being roll-fed, passing on the savings to you, with the flexibility of being sheetfed.

HEIDELBERG SPEEDMASTER XL 75

Our Speedmaster XL 75 is our only B2 litho press but it has all the automated features of the Speedmaster range. It’s worth mentioning that automation not only saves us time, it also makes us more economical with resources. For example, the automated, pre-programmed wash sequences mean that we use just as much water and detergent as is needed.

We’ve actually recently upgraded our XL 75 to make it even more efficient. Our B2 press now uses LE UV inks like the B1 presses. These inks are cured after printing, making them touch-dry in just seconds and saving us a significant amount of time.

NELA AUTOMATIC PLATE BENDER

Before printing any orders, our litho presses need their aluminium plates to be prepared. This involves etching on the artwork but also, each plate needs bending slightly in order to clip onto the presses. This used to be a manual task for us but the Nela saves us a lot of time. We can now produce 144 plates per hour on one machine compared to manually bending 124 an hour using two of our previous benders.

Each press has unique plate bending requirements. Our Nela Plate Bender has been custom made for the presses in our factory and for our way of working. Using a barcode system, the Nela automatically groups plates by job – making the lives of our operators so much easier.