A series of blogs focusing on the many machines we have here at Ottimo Digital. We rely on these machines every day to translate our skills and talent into world-class print, and these blogs will tell you more about what they're capable of, and why we chose each particular one.

Nick Lindwall beams when you mention "The Kongsberg". It's not hard to see why. This colossal machine can crease, cut, score, mill, or perforate virtually any material from fine paper to thick perspex. The top speed of the tool head, 100 meters per minute, makes it amongst the fastest in its class even now, 5 years after purchase. The machine can handle media up to 3.2m wide and has a total working area that exceeds 10 square metres. With its incredible range of tools, from the high power milling unit to the rotary fabric cutter, the Kongsberg C-Series is one of the most versatile pieces of equipment at Ottimo's disposal.

"Back in 2015, we were cutting all our prints by hand and the team here were absolute masters at it. But gaps in our capabilities began showing up when clients began asking for more curved cuts and shapes that were tricky to cut manually. We knew what we needed, but we also wanted to be future proof given the size of our investment, so we thought long and hard about which finishing table to choose. We had a few options, but our clear goal was to get the largest and most capable machine we could afford. And that was the Kongsberg C-Series."

When it was first delivered and set up, the C-Series immediately won friends at Ottimo. Not only could it cut sinuous curves in foamboard, lettering in perspex, and shapes in film and fabric, it cut with unerring, incredible accuracy and consistency, and the team was delighted with it from day one, when for a demonstration job it casually cut 100 perfect circles out of foamex in less than five minutes.

Nick Lindwall explained how easy it is to use, saying, "The Kongsberg training is comprehensive, and the machine is powered by easy to use software, so setting up jobs is now a quick and straightforward process. Given the size of the investment, we chose to get a comprehensive toolset to really start punching above our weight in the exhibition print sector. Not only does the Kongsberg allow us to print and cut a wide variety of exhibition type substrates we couldn't cut before like perspex and Dibond, but it has also sliced finishing times down to mere minutes, and almost completely freed the team from laborious hand cutting."

"We love the Kongsberg," Nick concluded, "it has totally justified our investment. It's a key factor in matching the capabilities of much larger, less agile, exhibition print providers and offers us some interesting new capabilities we have yet to explore. It has really put us in a different league!"

Machine Spotlight: Kongsberg C Series