BR Printers, USA
BR Printers Increases Capacity and Throughput with New Book Production Solutions from Hunkeler
BR Printers, founded in Silicon Valley at the birth of the production digital printing era in the early 1990s, now has several locations nationally. These include mirrored book printing plants in California and Kentucky, a direct mail facility in Colorado, Content Management Corporation (a BR company) in Fremont, California, an offset book printer, National Graphic Solutions in Appleton, Wisconsin, as well as the recently acquired C.J. Krehbiel Company in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Demand for book printing has been a growth area and saw even more growth during the pandemic as people on lockdown found more time to both read and write books,” says Adam DeMaestri, BR Printers’ President and CEO. “As a result, the book printing market in the United States is somewhat underserved, and we have seen increasing demand in our Kentucky and California plants. We were seeking a way to improve throughput and productivity in our Kentucky operation, especially the ability to run our HP T240 PageWide Web press at its rated speed of over 500 feet per minute, instead of at half that speed with the previous roll system.”
The company began a review of the available options and determined that this “need for speed” could best be met by two solutions from Standard Finishing: an in-line Hunkeler Roll-to-Plowfold solution for producing ready-to-bind, glued book blocks and a near-line Hunkeler/Horizon Roll-to-Saddlestitch solution for booklet production. “Not only would these solutions allow us to ramp up the speed of the press to its maximum rated speed on the book block line, but with the addition of the saddlestitch line, it would allow us to build that business as well, for which we were seeing growing demand,” DeMaestri explains.
