Established in 1979, Lancashire Board and Paper Co Ltd is a thriving innovator of bespoke board-based packaging and component parts manufacture. Based in Burnley, they have been providing a box making design and manufacturing service to a wide range of customers for over 40 years.
With its ISO 9001 quality management accreditation and servicing multi-national and local customers of all sizes from its facility in Burnley, Lancashire Board and Paper aims to provide total customer satisfaction.
Complex Boxes
To fulfil the increasing demand for more complex boxes, in widely different run lengths, the company needed to increase their gluing capacity. For more than 15 years, they had been operating an old Andrew and Suter Able gluer, which continues to produce excellent quality products, but is no longer fast enough in production speed.
The brief was for a machine which could increase the existing capacity and cope with some of the difficult configurations and panel sizes.
Jean Van Boeckel, General Manager, Lancashire Board, met with Kolbus Autobox and was convinced by the capabilities of the Autobox Multi-Nova MN400 Multipoint gluer. Van Boeckel visited Houghton Regis to sign off on the machine, taking several of his most complicated jobs. He was suitably impressed and delivery, installation and training were swiftly organised. Within four days of commissioning and training by one of Kolbus UK’s Multipoint specialists, Lancashire Board were running at a significantly higher run rate per hour.
Van Boeckel said, “We needed a machine to increase our output. The Multi-Nova was the most logical step up from our old Able gluer. Not only does it take a similar time to set up, but it also runs so much quicker.”
He continued, “The installation process was well planned out by Kolbus UK. A few weeks before the installation, the engineer even gave us a call to go through what was needed on site for the week. We are also pleased with the speed of installation and quality of build from Kolbus-Autobox.”
In Detail
The Multi-Nova MN400 three point gluer is firmly established as a ‘go to’ machine, with its versatility, compact design, and robust construction.
Ease and speed of set-up is a key feature, typically five to ten minutes for straight-line, and 15 to 25 mins for crash lock. With auto-feed, front fold lifting hooks, and quick release adjustment handles, the first section of the machine is key to the fast make-ready of the gluer, and there is a computerised memory control for repeat glue position jobs.
The MN400 has a small footprint – only 4m long – facilitated by the special feature of having the compression unit under the machine. This also means that finishing of boxes can happen at the back of the machine as they go straight beneath it, back towards an operator topping the machine up to be palletised.
Running speeds of between 1,000 and 3,000 boxes per hour mean that the MN400 is ideally matched to most flat bed die-cutters and can ease the load of the increased set-times of high-speed folder-gluers. Maximum blank sizes of 2000 x 1000mm for straight line and 1700 x 1000mm for auto-lock styles allows for a wide range of work to be glued. In fact, over 150 FEFCO styles can be produced, regular runners consist of 0200, 0201, 0207, 0217, 0701, 0715, 0717 using materials from cartonboard up to BC doublewall corrugated board.
One stand-out feature of the MN400 is that it produces a 90% finish fold, enabling the operator to control the quality of the finish and in particular eliminating fish-tailing and poor creasing. This is particularly important when producing smaller quantities of high value work. In short, The MN400 is an ideal converting machine for space conscious sheet-plants looking to convert small-large run lengths of tricky straight-line and crash-lock box work.
Arran Sethi, Director of Sales, Kolbus UK, concluded, “The Multi-Nova gluer is becoming equally as popular as our Autobox boxmakers. This is due to the requirement for a well-priced, compact machine that produces bespoke sizes, styles, and quantities quickly without the need for lengthy set ups or large space requirements. In Lancashire Board’s case, this was simply a requirement to increase output. In the last 12 months, we have installed close to ten Multi-Nova machines in the UK & Ireland alone.”
