This Calendar Is All Thumbs
Product Description
Bad Wire-O Binding
What’s wrong with this picture? My daughter recently purchased a calendar for her friend (meaning I purchased it) and showed it to me when she received it in the mail. My kids always make fun of me when I look at the binding of the book before opening it. Here there was something interesting.
This is punched with a “thumb cut” for calendars with hangers. This is more popular in Europe than it is here in The US. Most of our calendars have a round “hanger hole” at the opposite end of the binding edge. Parenthetically we sell the only paper punching machine that can punch the hanger hole simultaneously with the binding edge. We have sold The Sterling Punchmaster to many printers who for work for Shutterfly. Please see The Sterling Punchmaster video under New Equipment, Punching Equipment above.
Normally one would purchase a 3:1 square hole, wire die with a thumb cut but that means doubling up on dies. You would also need a normal 3:1 die to punch books without a thumb cut. An economical option is to punch a thumb cut calendar is to purchase a 3:1 wire die and a separate thumb cut die. But here is the rub: You need to open the 3:1 die and pull out the center 3 or 4 pins to make room for the thumb cut pattern.
Here the printer did one of two things wrong. Either they are using a die where the pins cannot be pulled or they just didn’t bother pulling them out. The latter is most likely because even economical, table top punches like The PDI Rhino punches use dies where the pins can be pulled. This would have prevented a book that doesn’t look so good. Also, it is industry practice for the closed wire to be between the last page of the book and the rear cover.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them.
By the way, my daughter’s friend still likes the calendar. I didn’t have the heart to point this out to her. I that hope she doesn’t read this blog.
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.
