Redacción Alabrent
“WELCOME TO SILBERDRUCK – THE BROCHURE PRINTING COMPANY” is emblazoned in capital letters on the website of the family-owned company, which was founded in 1965 and employs around 100 people in a three-shift operation five days a week. In fact, brochures, magazines and catalogs were the specialty of the graphic arts company, which originally started in the publishing business, for a long time. Since the company launched its own online store, the focus has shifted from perfect binding to saddle stitching, which now accounts for a good 60 percent of the production volume.Up to 50 different jobs per day
Silber Druck prints up to 50 different jobs a day for customers in the three German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland – mainly using offset printing. The print runs are between 250 and 60,000 copies, with an average of 2,500 to 3,000 copies. The finishing systems have to be changed over frequently. Because the ST 450 saddle stitcher, which came from the second-hand market in Heidelberg in 2018, and the EB 4000 perfect binder, which was also purchased as a used machine in 2021, no longer met the latest standards, Silber Druck decided to invest in two new solutions from Muller Martini.
For saddle stitching, the choice fell on the 14,000 cycles per hour, whose features include the innovative Motion Control technology and the user-friendly interface with a larger touchscreen – for perfect binding on the 6,000 cycles per hour Alegro, whose stations are directly driven and individually controlled and which, thanks to its high degree of automation, boasts short set-up times.
In addition to the fast job changes, which require only a few manual interventions, Lucas and Niklas Silber also found the wide range of size variability offered by the two Muller Martini finishing systems to be a major selling point. They inspected both machines at the training center in Zofingen and at another customer's premises before the final sales negotiations took place immediately after drupa 2024 in Düsseldorf.
The Primera PRO is already up and running, with the Alegro to follow in March
Silber Druck put the Primera PRO, which features five flat pile feeders, a cover feeder and a Perfetto compensating stacker, into operation last November – “to our complete satisfaction,” as Lucas and Niklas Silber emphasize. The Alegro, with a twelve-station 3692 gathering machine and Granit three-knife trimmer, will start production next March.
“With the two new machines, we are strengthening our position in the market because we now have significantly greater production reliability for sensitive delivery dates. We also wanted to send a signal to our staff that we believe in the future of the printing industry and our company,” Lucas and Niklas Silber emphasize.