Binders, Printers, and Businessmen
Product Description
When asked, every man thinks he’s a good driver and good in bed. But there must be some that are better than others, right?
My father did a lot of business with a bindery owner who would buy a machine for a particular job and then sell it back to my Dad. Sometimes the same machine would change hands a few times. He didn’t care, the cost of the machine was built into the job and no matter how much he spent, sending out the job would have cost more.
One bindery owner I know is a very savvy businessman. You walk into his shop and you see fairly new equipment, well maintained and clean. Another bindery owner in the same area has a shop with, let’s say, less than optimal equipment. He has a Sickinger wire binder that is about 25 years old. The problem is that it is a very slow wire binder. It produces about 200 books per hour. Almost every other wire binder on the market can double or triple this output, but let’s just say double. So if he averages 100,000 books per year, he could have saved over 200 man hours (assuming he uses two people including material handling) per year he would have saved at least 3,000 man hours in the past fifteen years. If he pays his people $15 per hour, he would have saved a minimum of $45,000. This doesn’t count insurance, workman’s comp, or overhead. So how much did he save by having a less than Sterling Wire Binding Machine in the long run?
I once told a bindery owner in California that if he made his own plastic coil he would save $100,000 per year and the machine at that time only cost $28,000. His reply to me was; “I’m not so much interested in saving money as making money.”
Even though times are tough right now I hear about companies outsourcing hundreds of thousands of dollars in binding services per year when they can bring the machinery in to do it in-house for less than $100,000. There are also may printers and binders binding their work manually. Does this make sense in an age where other manufacturers are using robotics?
New bindery systems are light-years faster and more efficient than older ones, and they can produce both high-quality, long- and short-run work with much less labor.
Testimonials
The Coilmaster Jr. is very easy to set up and reliable as can be. We train temps to run the machine and they do a great job. We save 60 – 70% on plastic coil costs by making our own coil.
Their training was awesome. Now the girls that were trained are training others. We are coil binding 18″ long books. The Coilmaster is truly great!!!
I purchased my first Digibinder in 2007. I get buried once a year by Town Reports so I bought another one. Once a year I drive one of them down to Spiel for preventative maintenance. These things last forever.
The Wiremaster Pro is amazing. It does the work of three wire binders with half the labor. We love it.
We’ve been doing plastic coil binding for 30 years but David Spiel really took us back to school. He is the first vendor ever to teach us about pitch, and filament gauge, hole shape and diameters. The Coilmaster Jr. Plus rocks!
We had never done coil binding before we purchased The Sterling Digipunchmaster and The Coilmaster Jr. Plus. We bound 2,500 on our first day of production. Since we purchased them during the pandemic, we received no installation or training, just great installation and training videos.
I can’t say enough good about the people at this company. They are excellent to work with. I like the equipment they sell too.
I can’t say enough good about the people at this company. They are excellent to work with. I like the equipment they sell too.
What we like is the ease of operation and set up. The machine is what I call an open system, a machine where it is easy to see how it operates and easy to locate all the functions.
We’re getting 650 books per hour on The Coilmaster and we’re loving it. We have 250,000 books to do in the next two months and instead of dreading this job like we used to, we now say: Bring it on.
In-line coil forming and inserting is the most important feature for us on the Coilmaster. Buying and waiting for plastic coil proved to be a hardship. We can now optimize our production time, turning around multiple jobs more quickly.
We tried another automatic coil machine and it failed to perform. We bought a Coilmaster System and after it validated our decision, we bought two more systems. This machine gave us the production speeds we were looking for.
