Five-Color Coater with Perfecting Boosts Production Capacity

Polish printer DTL has its premises in Porabka, a picturesque community nestled in the foothills of the Beskids near Bielsko-Biala in the south of the country. It is already a longstanding user of sheetfed offset technology from KBA.

The latest investment was a Rapida 75 with five printing units, coater and perfecting after the second unit. It replaced a Performa 66 and has lent a significant boost to production capacity in the printshop. 

DTL was founded in 1998 and offers a wide range of print products. “We are a very universal print business,” says proprietor Zdzislaw Wawak. “We handle everything from uncomplicated work such as business cards and stationery to more sophisticated jobs in the fields of advertising or packaging. DTL has specialised in the B2 format, and we work together with advertising agencies as well as industrial customers and end users. Most of our orders are for short to medium run lengths. We also deal with the finishing ourselves, i.e. die-cutting and gluing. The extended print format of the Rapida 75 brings us a definite competitive advantage.”

The Rapida 75-5+L SW2 is already the company's fifth KBA installation. In recent years, DTL has operated, among others, a Rapida 75 with five colours and coating and a five-colour Performa 66. The latter lacked a facility for coating, which was one of the reasons for the replacement. Zdzislaw Wawak: “The missing coater on the Performa and the different formats of the two presses limited our flexibility. With a common format, we can make better use of our production time. In addition, we still handle a few single-colour jobs. We nevertheless wanted to avoid buying a two-colour perfector, and so the 2/3 configuration of the Rapida 75 was for us an ideal choice. It permits us to print the local magazines in a single pass, but can also take care of the full-colour products which make up the bulk of our production.”

Zdzislaw Wawak makes no secret of the fact that he requested quotations from various suppliers before signing the actual purchase: “The comparisons with other presses showed us that the print quality on the Rapida 75 was the best. And our previous good experience with the service provided by KBA also influenced the decision.”

The new Rapida 75 has already been in production for some time now. And as Zdzislaw Wawak points out, the latest technology developments have certainly proved their worth in practice. “The perfecting unit is an excellent solution and functions absolutely reliably,” he says. “The design changes on the feeder are also very useful. All kinds of paper or board, even poorer or slightly wavy qualities, are fed into the press without problems.” Adam Slazynski, small format sales director at KBA CEE, explains: “The new feeder head is manufactured at KBA-Mödling in Austria, like those of all the larger Rapida presses. And it is similarly engineered to handle the full range of substrates from thin commercial papers to thicker packaging boards.”

In addition to the print format, the facility for inline coating on the new press greatly simplifies production planning for DTL. “In the past, we often had the situation that the press without coating was standing idle, but the coater press was running without interruption at its capacity limit. We can now coat on both presses at the same time, or else split longer jobs between the two. And that means we can offer our customers faster turnarounds. The perfecting unit, furthermore, allows us to take on new 1/1 and 2/2 jobs, which we always avoided before. At the moment, the printing of 2/2 books and publications is a very attractive segment for us,” says Zdzislaw Wawak. He is positively captivated by the perfecting unit of the Rapida 75. Mode conversion is fully automatic and takes between one and two minutes, depending on the sheet format.