​​The new Autobox AB300 boxmaker is a hit at Cumberland Packaging

Cumberland Packaging Ltd are a well-established independent sheet plant producing corrugated and solid board cartons, converted polystyrene, and other foams. From their Southend-on-Sea plant using their own lorry fleet they deliver to a wide area of the UK. On time – every time being their ethic.
Over recent years Cumberland had invested heavily in volume machines and were now looking to increase their short to medium run capacity. They were impressed by the excellent performance and support for their MultiNova MN400 multipoint gluer installed in 2019 so they turned again to Kolbus Autobox for a short to medium run solution. 

John Watson, Cumberland Packaging Managing Director, and Mark Bennett, Production Manager, visited Autobox’s manufacturing facility Houghton Regis in September last year. They were impressed by the infrastructure and build process, with a large percentage of parts being made in-house. The Autobox AB300, Multicut MC300, and Table Feeder TF300 were demonstrated with a wide variety of jobs trialled and completed with ease. Previously operating a rotary slitter and beamslotter combination, Cumberland packaging saw huge benefits in the 60 second set times and average run speeds of 500 boxes per hour. Suitably impressed, Cumberland placed an order before leaving the factory. 

The new machine installation was completed on schedule earlier this month and training started on day two. By days four and five live jobs were being produced. Jobs that were originally taking all day were being completed in less than two hours. Also, shifting the  work from tooled diecutting machines on to the Autobox equipment meant that set times were almost 30minutes faster, without the need for an expensive bespoke tool.

One of Cumberland’s most experienced operators, Aaron Lester, summed up his opinion of the new Autobox installation: “I’m used to running flat-bed diecutters, beamslotters, and rotary slitters. I absolutely love this new boxmaker. It is such a modern machine with touch screen control and automatic set-up. It was installed to produce short run lengths of standard type 0201 work, but I have already put jobs through this machine that we never thought we could. We do a lot of pad, insert, divider work, the Autobox can be set up extremely quickly to produce exactly what I need. Sometimes that can be three jumbo 0401’s from stock board, or up to 1000 A4 size 0201’s. The Kolbus-Autobox enables a single pass operation most of the time. It’s very flexible, producing 0400 range wraps particularly fast and effectively.”

Kolbus UK director of sales, Arran Sethi, said: “The Table feeder enables the high traction belts to pull in the bottom sheet from a pile allowing single operator use. The new installation is completing jobs in a quarter of the time with better quality. This has enabled Cumberland to not only support their current database of customers but service more companies who need smaller run lengths of bespoke size boxes, turned around quickly.”