What the heck happened to Spiral Binding?
Product Description
What Happened to Spiral Binding
Back when I started in this industry, spiral binding meant wire spiral binding. Today spiral binding means plastic coil binding. Why? Take a look at the picture above.
Wire spiral bound books damage very easily, not as much as a book bound on a double loop wire binding machine, but bad enough. Remember Rand McNally road atlases? They are still in business but I assume many of you are using GPS instead. They bound their books with spiral wire purposefully. Why? They would get destroyed and people would have to buy new ones. A recent visit to their web site has confirmed that they have switched over to plastic coil.
Back in them there days; plastic coil was not very popular. The only way to bind the books was to bind them by hand, starting off the first three loops manually, spinning them in with a roller machine, and then cutting and crimping using pliers. Usually an operator could do about 100 books per hour. If it was a thick book, it could be as little as 20. Take a look at the first few seconds of this video.
Wire spiral binding machines by comparison could yield about 300 books per hour. You would hang a book on pins and the wire spun through the book and was then crimped. Easy peasy, right? The only problem was the books looked cheap and was not good for school books or kids books. I had two girls so when they brought home a “Hello Kitty” book, it was always bound with plastic coil. Also, many states refused to allow books with spiral wire to be sold to schools because the spirals could be ripped from the book and be turned into a weapon.
Up until about five years ago, Sickinger and Freundlich Gomez built semi-automatic spiral binders. In fact, I still have a mint Sickinger PS517 Spiral Binder in stock. You can see a picture here. Bielomatik and Womaco still build automatic spiral binders that also punch in-line.
The only companies that still bind their books with spiral wire are manufacturers that bind many books and try to sell them as inexpensively as possible. After all, when was the last time you saw a wire spiral bound book?
This is the first in a series on the history of plastic coil binding. Stay tuned for the invention of automatic plastic coil binders, even though it is not printed on paper and that Print is 59% more engaging for users than online articles.
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.
