Muller Martini Supra

The company’s nadir came in January 2004 when Polestar Petty placed its order for six new gatherer-stitcher systems from Muller Martini’s rival Ferag, whose UniDrum system had a top speed of 30,000 copies per hour (cph) compared with Muller’s fastest offering, the Tempo, which runs at 22,000cph. “The Tempo has become the industry standard at that level, but we just haven’t had the machines to compete in the very top layer of the market,” says Muller Martini UK sales director

Roger Cartwright.

But now Muller is back with a new and much faster flagship model: the Supra, which it launched at Drupa 2004. And just to prove it’s back on top, two weeks ago it signed a deal with Prinovis, thought to be worth £18m. The deal comprised two Supra systems (complete with inserters, stackers, trimmers and compensators) to equip the European gravure giant’s new Liverpool gravure superplant (PrintWeek, 1 September).

High-speed redesign
As the Supra’s speed is in a class above and beyond any other Muller machine, there’s been a sweeping approach to its design. Every major component has been re-thought and redesigned to work at the new speed, and little of any significance has been drawn from existing Muller stitchers.

Beginning at the front end, the Supra has a new pocket wheel feeder option, also known as a “paddle wheel” or a carousel. Each of the 15 pockets on the rotating wheel picks up a section and, using a newly developed accelerating roller to bring it up to 50% of chain speed, accelerates the book onto the gathering chain, where it’s registered and opened with grippers or suction. The usual high-folio, low-folio and no-lap signatures can be handled.

Crucially, the pocket feeder slows down the feed of sections. “Try taking sections out of a single hopper at 30,000 an hour, and you’ll end up with jams and damaged sections galore,” says Cartwright. “The pocket feeder divides that process down into 15 increments, so it’s much gentler on the individual sections while still keeping up with the high speed of the stitching line overall.”

For users who don’t want the speed (or the expense) of the pocket wheel feeder, there’s the option of working either with PrintRoll logs or with Muller’s 416 flat pile feeder. This is the feeder that’s been proved on the Tempo and can run at up to 25,000cph. Because the Supra’s feeder architecture is modular, it’s possible to equip it with any combination of 416 and pocket wheel feeders up to its maximum of 30 stations – a typical configuration might include the first three or four feeders as pocket wheels, with the remainder as 416s.

Dynamic stitching
The Supra’s gathering chain has been narrowed down to give improved smoothness of travel. Sections on the chain are electrostatically “blocked” to prevent their leaves flying up at high speeds.

The stitching unit uses a “boxer” principle, again for speed reasons. Working on the fly, the two stitching head carriages travel in opposite directions and thereby cancel out each other’s countering dynamic forces. Added to this, each stitching station only stitches every second product, which effectively doubles the stitching speed. The boxer principle, coupled with the alternate product stitching, means the Supra runs smoothly at all speeds.

There are two models of stitching unit: the HK 75 VS, with four stitching heads per carriage, has a maximum stitch thickness of 4mm; and the HK 85 VS, with three stitching heads per carriage, has a maximum stitch thickness of 6mm.

A new rotary delivery, with a noticeable four-pointed star wheel, links the stitcher with the trimmer. The gathering chain is lowered and products run onto a sword for smooth feeding.

There’s a new trimmer for the Supra, known simply and inelegantly as the “crank trimmer”. Unusually for a trimmer, it has four double grippers that hold the stitched book from entry through cutting until it’s ejected onto the delivery. Muller is sticking to its principle of trimming head-and-foot first, with the foredge last, which it claims guarantees a squarer book. Upper and lower knives shear-trim the books at full speed.

Interestingly, the crank trimmer has the option of being sited remotely, and can be used either as a stand-alone machine or connected via aerial conveyors (Muller offers the NewsGrip conveyor system) to the stitcher. This translates as not only great flexibility in terms of footprint and configuration, but also gives the ability to introduce other products into the trimmer and/or the inserter – stitched-on-press books is just one example.

Automatic makeready
Though the Supra, which is designed for super-long runs, emphasizes productivity over makeready, it is highly automated. This cuts makeready to around half an hour for a typical job change.

The Muller Martini Automation Platform (MMAP) is a centralised panel that controls the set-up and operating parameters of the line, with several local control stations (known in Muller-speak as HMIs or Human-Machine Interfaces) at strategic locations along the line’s length. The local stations tap into the MMAP system, allowing, say, the trimmer’s parameters to be adjusted from the feeder and vice versa.

The MMAP is JDF ready, and a remote access module allows direct linking to the control system for software updates and diagnostics. The Supra can also be programmed for barcode or database-driven selective binding, and it’s possible to add ink-jet mail tables to address individual books as they travel along the gathering chain, to add personalisation to the internal pages.

The Supra’s level of automation makes it a more flexible machine than its rival, the Ferag UniDrum, which is an entirely manual machine.

Quality control
You’d expect, and you’ll get, all the standard quality control mechanisms on the Supra, including a stitch control, missing sections, lateral thickness measurement, skewed sheet monitor, long book detector, trim monitor and a sample control for the optional sample gluer module. Rejected copies or sections are ejected automatically, and waste collection is linked with the waste extraction from the trimmer, which in turn can be linked with factory-wide waste collection systems.

The Supra has been designed to be a component in a wider system. Its fore and aft ancillaries include the Integro inserter, a twin channel system for high output; the Robusto compensating stacker, which has a new and gentler ejection process for full stacks, together with the option for electrostatic charging of lightweight or slippery products on infeed; and the Fontana auto palletiser, which can palletise loose as well as packaged bundles automatically and also integrate a pre-stacking unit to build stacks of uniform height from varying bundle sizes.

With the Supra, Muller Martini is setting its sights firmly on the world’s largest printers: high-speed web and gravure are its main targets. “The top end of the commercial and publications print sector is a new market in the UK, and we believe it’s got good, stable growth. With the Supra, we’ve got the perfect machine to meet those printers’ needs,” says Cartwright.

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SPECIFICATIONS
Max speed 30,000cph
Max untrimmed spine length 340mm (all three lap types)
Max stitching thickness 4mm or 6mm
Max book size, untrimmed 340x275mm
Max trim thickness 30mm
Number of feeder stations 30
Price from £1.25m
Contact Muller Martini UK 0845 345 3588 www.mullermartini.com

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THE ALTERNATIVES
Ferag UniDrum 350/420
Ferag’s 30,000cph UniDrum, successor to the hugely successful CombiDrum, is the only other stitching line on the market capable of holding a candle to the Supra (although there’s a faster Ferag, the SHT-350, turning out 40,000cph). Launched at Ipex in 2002, the UniDrum now has 11 UK installations - one at St Ives Peterborough, and the remaining ten at various Polestar sites across the country. Like the Supra, the UniDrum is normally supplied as a component in a system, with a full range of stackers, conveyors, inserters and palletisers. The UniDrum is a different beast from the Supra. Working on rotary rather than linear architecture, it is similar in principle to a huge inside-out inserting drum. Sections are fed by the Jetfeeder (a suction feeder that is now standard across Ferag inserters, polybagging lines and perfect binders for ease of operation) into a pocket on the drum.
Max speed
• 30,000cph
Max untrimmed spine length
• 350: 350mm
• 420: 420mm
Max stitching thickness
• 10mm
Max book size, untrimmed
• 350: 310x340mm
• 420: 310x420mm
Number of feeder stations
• 350: 10
• 420: 7
Price
• from £1.75m
Contact
• WRH Marketing 01279 635657 www.wrh-marketing-uk.com