Rutlege printing
" I originally bought our first automated booklet maker 18 years ago. It was an astronomical investment that opened up new markets and yielded us more sales. Kind of became a basic tool for services we offered. It was a love/hate relationship as the machine aged. In recent years, the CP Bourg booklet maker required me to have to really tweak many machine settings to get the simplest of jobs completed. End of life assigned to it from the manufacturer meant it’s time was nearing. With less staff and still needing to provide booklet making services to maintain sales it became apparent I find a new booklet maker. Certainly, I wasn’t excited about spending the money but losing existing work was out of the question. I also needed a reliable, automated and productive machine that could run without as much operator input. (Seems to be a common goal in post COVID business.) After some research, I decided to order a machine made by Duplo from Tompkins Printing Equipment. The machine was half the cost of the first one I bought 18 years ago. The new machine is tiny in all aspects. However, it is highly intuitive and can produce a significant volume. It eliminates the need for 10 separate bins to collate and simply feeds from one small unit called a sheet feeder. Because our jobs are printed digitally nowadays, we simply run the book pages in reverse order put them in the booklet maker and when it picks up the sheets it reverses the order to the correct sequence. The sheet feeder delivers a precise/ programmed number of sheets to the saddle stitcher, then to the knife folder and then to the face trimmer. It’s very quiet, has modest speeds but is proving to be far more productive than the machine it replaced. And that alone will keep the gray hairs off my head. It uses ultrasonic waves to detect double sheet errors. It also provides a positive electric charge to each sheet before entering the booklet maker thus eliminating static electricity and the problems associated with it. Unfortunately, the first job on the new machine couldn’t have had more difficult specifications built in. First it was a 48 page book, 3000 books thus being 36,000 sheets of paper. The paper is coated and very susceptible to static electricity issues. The number of pages was too great for us to face trim the edge of the book on the old booklet maker. This one does it with ease and quietly. Here’s a couple of videos from some work I did this afternoon. Thanks for letting me share."