Gardners sings praises of its new EFI Vutek HS125 F4

Gardners has installed an EFI Vutek HS125 FAST 4 (F4) printer at its Cardiff site.

It is Gardner’s seventeenth digital printer in its current roster, and all work from its HP 7600 has been migrated to the HS125, along with significant amounts of roll and sheet work from its other 5m-wide fleet of printers. “The HS125 F4 will sit alongside our Durst 1330 as a mainline printer,” said Richard Courtney, managing director at Gardners, which was acquired by UK private equity fund Elaghmore earlier this year and currently working with other subsidiaries to create the recently announced Hexcite group. “It’ll become a main printer for us to provide a significant amount of extra capacity to service additional retail work. It will also help deal with ever-decreasing lead times, and will boost capacity by increasing our opportunity to say yes,” said Courtney. Operations director Adrian Hallett - who oversaw the implementation of the machine, bought from CMYUK - added: “The addition of the three-quarter automation has allowed us to produce longer print runs with a single operator, in turn creating capacity.” Gardners has installed a camera on the printer’s gantry giving the single operator a 360-degree view. It has also added its own self-engineered roll-to-roll offline cutting system. “The printer has bedded in very well,” said Hallet. “It’s outputting 150 sheets (8 x4ft) per hour, hitting rates that were advised. The printer is going to be a very, very good asset for us.” Training took place on-site over a two-week period with on-going support from Amira Bouchiba, CMYUK’s training application specialist.