A good part of my bindery work experience included the high volume guillotine cutting of millions of little tags and labels for a printer who serviced the garment industry. These ranged from tiny cloth garment tags (you know, like the ones inside t-shirts that scratch and annoy you) to tags and labels printed on regular stock.
Today we’re talking guillotine cutters with Dave Double of Double Equipment, a bindery equipment repair specialist based in Ohio.
Here’s a guillotine cutter accessory that has been around as long as guillotine cutting machines. It's a simple jogging block which can be either homemade from wood or manufactured in plastic with a magnetic base. Their simple purpose is to keep cut pieces from scattering all over the cutter bed and to help in jogging cut sheets. Nearly every guillotine cutter operator uses one.
In a bindery equipment operator’s fantasy world, every sheet of paper is perfectly square, perfectly flat and all the edges are straight, from the first sheet to the last. In our real world, intruded upon by competitive pressures and the low-cost paper that comes our way, we know this is not the case. Sometimes paper isn't stored right, maybe it distorts during and after printing, maybe it's a deckle edge sheet or maybe the converter simply does a sloppy job.
Learning to run a folding machine can be a little overwhelming, especially if you’re thrust directly into a bindery department production environment without much training. I remember my first day on the job being shown the antique Baum folding machine and thinking, “Seriously now…that thing actually folds paper?”
One of the drawbacks to trimming thick saddle-stitched books is that it’s nearly impossible to get a perfect trim on all three sides. Usually the head and foot of the spine of the book will tear or nick during the trimming process. There is simply no way to prevent this since the area near the spine has nothing to support it in the trimmer or cutter.
A previous Bindery Success blog article discussed tips on getting better register when running oblong sheets. This next technique was submitted to our Bindery Success newsletter by Martin Smith of The Journeyman Press in MA.
Whenever I watch the countless moving parts on saddle stitching and perfect binding lines, I’m amazed that all those folded sheets of text and cover make it to the end without marks, scratches and scuffs. Well, most of the time they do.
Here’s a challenge. Check out this list of tips about caring for your guillotine cutter, and then guess when they were first published. I’ll reveal the date below but resist the temptation to cheat by scrolling down.
They laugh when we start cranking the handle on the new CreaseStream Mini scoring machine. It happens every time. “Hey, does that thing come with a monkey?!” is a favorite quip, usually heard in the first two minutes and then like clockwork throughout the show. At one recent in-plant printing conference an exhibitor could be seen jumping around like an organ grinder’s chimpanzee in mock imitation of us working the Mini creaser, his buddies laughing like hyenas.