An award winning commercial printer, Herbert Walker and Son is employing no less than six 700 Series peristaltic pumps from Watson-Marlow Bredel to deliver finishing coatings such as varnish and ‘flitter’ to various Heidelberg litho printing presses. As a result, the state-of-the-art West Yorkshire facility has witnessed a reduction in changeover time from 45 minutes to less than 60 seconds.
“Although we have three Heidelberg Speedmaster litho printing presses, we opted to replace the original Heidelberg supplied diaphragm pumps with 700 Series models from Watson-Marlow Bredel,” explains the company’s operations director Mark Vanston. “This is because the time taken to change from one type of coating to another and flush out all of the tanks would be around 45 minutes. Considering that we typically require a changeover every 8 hours, the decision to use peristaltic technology was easily justified.”
Downtime between print runs costs time and money. Watson-Marlow Bredel pumps are self-priming and dry running and require no seals or valves. The pumped fluid is totally contained within a tube, avoiding the need for cleaning or downtime for maintenance.
Herbert Walker is using six 700 series pumps on its Heidelberg printing presses at Shipley. The newest pump is fitted to a recently acquired Heidelberg 102 SPC litho model with twin coating unit. This configuration brings with it increased flexibility for customers requiring additional coating options, while still offering up to six colours or 5/1 printing in a single pass.
“As a company we’ve used Watson-Marlow Bredel technology for many years,” says Mr Vanston. “To be honest I’m not aware of any other suppliers of peristaltic pumps, and furthermore I wouldn’t even look because the reliability of our 700 Series models has been excellent, particularly considering our Heidelberg presses run 24 hours a day. We never get blockages and there is no maintenance to worry about.”