Welcome to our Award Winning Bindery Success Blog!

Get Your 15 Minutes of Fame and a Chance to Win up to $250 in the Technifold Video Contest

Attention budding film makers…
…we know you’re out there because your bindery videos show up on our Facebook fan page.

We’re looking for short videos that showcase how you use Technifold tools to save money and time, increase productivity, decrease outsourcing, or do creative things for your customers. It can be as simple as scoring a 4 page brochure with a Tri-Creaser or as complicated as creasing, trimming and perfing a 4-up job with a half dozen tools on the machine.

Anything goes. If it’s helping your business or department in any way whatsoever, we’d love to see it in video. And we’re giving away some great prizes too!

First Prize—a $250.00 Amazon Gift Card
Second and Third Prize—a $50.00 Amazon Gift Card

Fast Action Bonus—the first 10 valid entries each get a $10 Amazon Gift card (see contest guidelines for details)

You stand a VERY good chance of winning. I can’t predict how many of you will enter, but I suspect there will only be 20 or so. Even if we get 50 to 100 entries, that’s some pretty good odds of making $50 to $250 for a few minutes of your time.

So whip out your Flip or your cell phone camera or your digital video camera and impress the world with your bindery productivity. Don’t worry if you’re not a George Lucas. Clear, simple shots are good and we’ll take care of the editing.  All submitted videos may be used in whole or part in future training and/or marketing materials from Technifold USA.

Click Here for the brief contest guidelines and when that next impressive job comes through your bindery, have your video camera at the ready.
Contest deadline is Tuesday May 31, 2011 so don’t delay.

According to Apple's website, there are more than 350,000 apps for their iPhone and iPads. Android has apps numbering somewhere in the tens of thousands. No one knows for sure. There are apps to tell you where to eat, what movie to see, for tracking packages and for doing pushups.

So you'd think in our high-tech printing and bindery industry there would be lots of helpful apps, right? After an admittedly quick search, I found all of 23. And that's all on one site.

The best part of this story is who is doing the creating. My guess would have been some teenager working in his parent's print shop on the weekends, distracting himself from running a folding machine or packing boxes. Or maybe a new 20-something employee bored with his entry-level duties.

There's one topic that routinely generates considerable unease when I speak with owners, managers and supervisors in the printing and bindery industry, or any small business. It's the employee or co-worker with the dreaded 'bad attitude.'

Several recent blog articles highlighted popular troubleshooting and setup techniques aimed at keeping signatures perfectly registered to the head as they travel the length of the saddle stitching machine. The tactic we're covering today is part of our series on the battle for register and it’s a simple one. In some ways it's really more of an insurance policy against mis-register. You won’t always need it but it’s a lifesaver when you have it to draw on!

The bindery scenario is this—you have an 8 page folded brochure, no stitches or glue, 8.5 x 11” trim size which folds again to 5.5 x 8.5”. If your press and folding machine (with right angle section) are large enough, you simply print the job as one 8-page signature then fold and trim to size, inline on the folder. The job becomes more difficult if your press is either too small to print the 8-page signature or your folder isn’t big enough or properly equipped to handle this type of folding work. Or maybe a customer supplies you with such a job.

I'll never forget the day I almost made a grown man cry over a cutting job. He was a good customer who came in that day for a press OK. While there, he decided to see how one of his label jobs was progressing and I happened to be setting up the job on the cutter.

In previous posts we discussed several tips to fix signature registration problems in saddle stitched books, most of which are helpful for both signature pockets as well as cover feeders. Once the book passes the cover feeder (or the first pocket if you don’t have a cover feeder) it passes into something of a no man’s land prior to the stitching unit. Today we'll look at two more tips to help in this area.

Saddle stitcher calipers are a key component in any stitching system. When set correctly they’ll detect missing or double signatures in the book, then stop the stitching mechanism and reject the book so signatures can be re-used.

This bindery tip from the “why didn’t I think of that” category is a clever update on an old-timer trick that will save you lots of time when you need to score a handful of samples, mockups or even short-run digital jobs.

The problem of static in the bindery and press room is a complex subject. Prior to the age of digital printing equipment a static problem typically reared its head in the cold, dry winter months. Today, modern copiers and some digital presses are subject to static problems year-round, and the increasing complexity of printing and finishing equipment means there is simply more opportunity for the creation of static charges.