“A clean machine is a happy machine,” declared by many a bindery supervisor over the years.
Keeping printing and bindery equipment clean in a dusty environment is a big challenge when so many dust gremlins are conspiring against you. Each day you have paper dust, spray powder from printing presses as well as atmospheric dust, pollen and pollutants barging in. If your bindery or pressroom is near a delivery dock, you also have road dust and dirt intruding.
It can be a headache, but there are times when it’s necessary to run a scoring or perforating job twice through a piece of bindery equipment. Maybe you have one creasing tool available but this job calls for two or three. Perhaps it’s an equipment scheduling problem and the small folder with one scoring tool is the only one available that day. The headache usually starts with the second pass through the machine, when the operator discovers the entire first pass didn’t register, or is in the wrong position, or is crooked. Worse yet, a customer discovers the problem!
We suspect this perforating problem happens more often than most printers would care to admit. The short version of the conversation goes like this:
Usually our work habits guide us smoothly through the day. We know without thinking which way to load the paper in the folder, press or cutter. We know by heart all the make-ready steps for dozens of jobs on numerous pieces of bindery equipment. Yet sometimes these good habits can turn against us. Here are four simple things to try when perplexed by your next post-press problem.
With this extreme cold weather blanketing much of the country we figured it would be a good time to review some of our past articles pertaining to cold weather questions, with static being a perennial favorite topic. Some might be surprised at the impact the cold can have on their bindery operations. Here are links to a few articles (including resources) that could help you in the coming frigid months, especially as temps start to dip. For those of you in Hawaii, the Caribbean and other warm climes, go ahead...be amused!
Static in the Print Shop & Bindery - Is There a Cure?
There may not be any flip-the-switch cure, but there are preventive measures that can keep you from pulling your hair out.
Tip for Beating Static on Your Folding Machine
A few homegrown but effective tips.
Dealing with Dry, Cracked Fingers in the Bindery and Press Room
Tired of having your fingers wrapped in Band Aids from January through April?
Cold Weather Tip for Folding Machines and Technifold Tri-Creasers
Ever leave your folding machine on a Friday in good running order only to find nothing but headaches right after the weekend? If it's really chilly on Monday mornings, or any morning, here's a shortcut that could save you some troubleshooting time on your folding machine.
The question of how to run 2-up folding jobs has many answers depending on the size and layout of the piece to be folded. We get occasional questions about this common layout, that of an 11x17” which folds 1x in half to 8.5x11, then again 2x to a #10 or 1x to a 5.5x8.5. The concept we're discussing really applies to any similar size and fold configuration where one piece folds and trims in the parallel section, which then sends two pieces to the right angle for folding
Saddle-stitched books can be produced in endless sizes and page counts which means you have hundreds of ways to fold the signatures that make up the book. The reality is that most shops use just a handful of standard impositions. These get filtered down by book size, page count, press size, folding machine capability and saddle stitcher capability, whether in-house or outsourced.
Chances are good that customer requests have gotten you involved in micro perforating, whether through in-house perf operations or through outsourcing. It’s common today for end users to run pre-perfed, pre-printed forms (supplied by their local printer) through their own laser printers, copiers or digital presses. Invoices and statements are good examples of this.
In the May/June issue of Post Press Magazine, they interviewed Hal Hinderliter, owner of a print consulting service from Milwaukee, Wisconsin aptly named Hal Hinderliter Consulting Services. He discussed an interesting topic called “Print that Performs.”
In our experience, a good portion of the traditional printing industry views the internet and related technologies as a back breaker to their businesses. The on-set of the “internet age” and “digital marketing” certainly has hit the industry hard, but in order to survive and thrive going forward, the concept of “Print that Performs” is one that should be embraced, as it encourages a more symbiotic, as opposed to adversarial, relationship between print and new technology.
In the process of folding paper we encounter ‘pushout’. As one sheet is folded inside another, the inside sheets naturally have a tendency to push out (or creep out) away from the spine by the thickness of the paper for each subsequent fold. Ideally this is all compensated for in the design stage where printed images on the inside pages or panels are shingled further inward toward the spine as they near the center of the stitched book (or folded piece,) and outer pages are moved away towards the face.