Pramod Engineering installs six Stitch Star machines

Once again, Pramod Engineering has made far-reaching developments so that the book and magazine binding business may flourish in the highly competitive age. After a series of Stitch Star installations with text book printers in Patna for a combination of side and centre stitching solutions, Pramod Engineering has installed six machines together at a single location, at the Sakshi Newspapers Press in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. This installation has helped save enormous manual binding labour, cut delays and drastically reduced rejections from the binding section. Stitch Stars are now running 24×7 for the binding of the Sunday magazine of Sakshi Newspapers.

All the six Stitch Star Flowlines from Pramod Engineering are equipped with two autofeeders, a reject copy ejector and two hand-fed stations. The forms are printed on two Manugraph Citylines. The top cover is a four pager, 80gsm UV-coated cover and the inside forms are 48gsm SNP. These two forms are then stitched on the Stitch Star machines. The impressive part on the printing end is the excellent inline UV coating on the forms, which PVK Prasad, director, Sakshi Newspapers, is very proud of. Prasad is credited with the establishment of one of the largest newspaper printing facilities in various cities all across AP, for Telegu newspaper Sakshi.

As per Divesh Nath of Pramod Engineering, the challenge was to supply high-speed equipment for binding at a competitive price. The European products do not prove to be cost-effective, at the Indian recovery rates prevalent in the newspaper industry. The second-hand machines that come into the market are at least 12-18 years old, hence may not be reliable for large-scale, high-speed, 24×7 production. Additionally, the second-hand machines run at half the speed of Pramod Engineering’s Stitch Stars and are also rated at half the dimensions while handing paper sizes.

The cost of binding for Sakshi Newspapers has come down to one-fifth of the rates that were being incurred while operating manually. Hence, the recoveries for capital employed could also be quick, given the huge volume of production. “Many newspapers all across the country face the big hassle of large-scale binding. In the meanwhile, Pramod Engineering is also building larger stitcher and trimmer machines for the copy notebook market,” added Divesh.