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.
In the spirit of the new year, here’s a list of the most popular bindery blog articles from the past year. If you’re looking for a particular bindery or post-press subject, don’t forget to use the search box at the very top of every page. We currently have 175 articles on the subject of bindery and printing to choose from!
Many years ago as I was running a folding machine, I bent over to pick up the next lift of paper, only to discover that I had two different shoes on. Clearly this was a sign I was in a rut and it was time for a change!
I always think of Bernard this time of year. This week I ran across an old picture of him taken at our printing company’s Christmas party in the early 80’s. It’s as if he somehow made that photo appear to say, “Hey, don’t forget about me!”