Welcome to our Award Winning Bindery Success Blog!

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Rodrigo Castellanos of Offset Universal, a printing company with an extensive perfect binding and saddle stitching operation. Although his company focuses on publishing and printing books for direct clients, their bindery equipment capabilities led them to do trade bindery work for numerous printing companies throughout Mexico. He offers insight on ways to stay productive and competitive in our ever-changing industry especially with regard to the perfect binding aspect of the business.

Most folding machine operators are familiar with the use of marks to aid in setting up any given folding job. Depending on your model of folding machine, it’s likely loaded with marks, indicators, dials and rulers to make it easier to set up. You probably have a lot of home-made marks of your own. Those of you with newer computer controlled automatic folders have it even better. You can dial up the exact same settings again and again with the push of a button.

Want to find out if your next interviewee for a bindery department opening is a good candidate? Try this experiment. Show them a piece of bindery equipment and briefly explain what it does. Then pause for a few moments and ask them, “What’s on your mind?” If they answer, “I was wondering what else I could do with it,” then you have a lifer who is perfect for bindery work.

My first day in the printing industry made me feel like I was one step closer to being a rock star. I had moved to New York City in the late 70’s, telling my parents I was going there to attend college. The real reason was that I wanted to join a rock-n-roll band, get a record deal and tour the world. You had to go to New York or LA to make that happen.

Small tabletop folding machines are simple, reliable pieces of bindery equipment. With their utility at doing short runs quickly and their prevalence in the used equipment market, they’re a popular option for digital print finishing departments.

If you manage a post-press operation, you know how easy it is to be pulled every which way by the daily details of running, maintaining and scheduling a mix of bindery equipment. Throw in an equipment breakdown, a personnel issue, or a snow storm and your headaches multiply.

I’d wager that the real story of our work life isn’t in the bindery and printing jobs found on our resumes or posted on our LinkedIn profiles. What makes us who we are is more often found in those long-forgotten jobs we don’t bother to include. Other times it’s the story behind a job that carries the real meaning and lesson, often in ways we don’t expect.

Reading bindery equipment instruction manuals (or any manual for that matter!) can be a chore. It’s work to learn something new. For the writer of the manual, it’s often hard to clearly convey a task in the written word. And sometimes as readers, we find ourselves trying to understand pages that might be poorly translated from another language.

As you increase the speed on a saddle stitcher (or any piece of bindery equipment,) you're likely to see more and more defects as the speed increases. I often quote Kevin Carey from his ABC’s of Diecutting, “Increasing speed exposes weaknesses in methods, in practices, in tools, in technology, in organization, and in knowledge, skill and experience.”

This is one of those bindery tricks that folding machine operators might not need often, but when needed can save a lot of setup time. If you’re folding a sheet in thirds and you don’t have a calculator or ruler handy, this technique will mark the sheet precisely in thirds, and you don’t have to convert from decimal to fractions of an inch.