Automating your bindery just makes sense. You want it to be a seamless extension of your print operation, not a tiresome bottleneck that can’t absorb the pace of your pressroom. Printers have become increasingly handy at moving away from manual processes – untying a noose choking their finishing department.

Cutting is one example.  While some print businesses have been ‘going to the guillotine’, so to speak, others have automated their binderies. This group can avoid the arduous, labour-intensive process of manual cutting to stop man hours slicing into their margins.

At Eastside Printing in Melbourne, a Horizon StitchLiner 5500 from Currie Group replaced manual guillotining four years ago. Eastside’s Graeme Pain has discovered several advantages. The StitchLiner’s three- and five-knife trimmer has reduced the guillotine work needed before and after stitching. Books can be bound two-up. Printing in A2 format used to require trimming top and bottom of the sheet with a 5mm fore-edge. Now sheets can be cut it in half straight off the press, with the A3-plus sheet fed to the StitchLiner – just as accurate, but much faster.

Inline trimming frees Eastside’s guillotine operator for smaller jobs more suited to guillotining. Leaflets and business cards get the manual touch, while volume trimming goes to the StitchLiner. After the 5500 was added, Eastside printed 341,000 books, a project that would have been farmed out for binding were it not for the productivity of inline trimming.

Currie’s sales director Bernie Robinson says Horizon’s ‘Intelligent Automation’ development philosophy has gone a long way towards eliminating pockets of labour-intensive handling in the A3-plus segment which Currie serves. Features include programmable memories and touchscreens for operators.

He lists several automated features Horizon has developed, some of them enhanced since Drupa. There are auto UV coating machines that drop a sheet on the conveyor and dry it at the same time, eliminating manual drying. At Ipex, Horizon will unveil its AFC-746F fully automatic B1 cross folder and an HT-80 auto three-knife trimmer connected to a BQ-470 perfect binder,to name just two offerings.

Alastair Hadley, Heidelberg’s general manager, sales and marketing, says there are varying levels of automation. This allows for the most price-effective option to be configured for each specific customer. Cutting, folding and stitching having benefitted most from automation, adds Hadley.

“Most post-press machinery now has some level of automation. This was particularly evident with regards to folding machines and saddlestitchers, which were the first areas to be considered for further automation. Now perfect binders, large and small, are catching up with varying levels of automation,” says Hadley.

The CIP4 effect
Slow in arriving, the advent of CIP4 data in the late 1990s, and later Job Definition Format (JDF), has enabled key post-press functions to be linked to pre-press and printing – and that, says Hadley, is a cost saver.

Ferag Australia managing director Thomas Klumpp break automation down into two trends. First, manual processes that have been replaced by technology. And second, manual kit superseded by automated machinery. He points to Ferag’s rotary gatherer/saddlestitcher, the new version of UniDrum, which came onto the market as a fully automated version around two years ago.

Klumpp says the UniDrum’s automation reduces labour and saves costs, improving ROI for commercial printers. Cost per copy is low, and it’s quick to reset, rapidly attaining its maximum 40,000cph speed.

But Klumpp believes there will be islands of manual operation in the bindery for the foreseeable future. “There is machinery where you still input the formats manually. Where that’s a job of only two or three minutes, it’s not worth automating that any further. Complete automation isn’t economical.”

Rayne Simpson, Ferrostaal’s general manager, print finishing, says jobs that can be easily automated are those involve basic, rapidly repetitive activity. “However, if a particular job is designed outside the standard format, such as a perfect bound book that requires the folded sections to be burst bound, then the burst bound perforating kit is a manual set-up that increases time and slows down the makeready.”

Manual requirements
MBO folding kit focuses on this area. Its equipment includes an integrated “slide out” slitter shaft system that speeds up the process by up to 80% of makeready times. He says guillotining is a finishing process that has been done manually for some time and will be “for some time yet”.

Simpson predicts MBO, Kolbus, Osako and Wohlenberg will focus on added-value options at Ipex to enhance the end product within automatic makereadies.

Muller Martini sales and service support manager Roman Beeler believes that while all major set-up and operational functions can be automated on the latest generation of finishing equipment, “the fine tuning to achieve the high output of modern finishing equipment is still dependant on the skills of the operator.

“Furthermore, in some areas, automation just doesn’t make sense because of cost versus benefit. It is also a question of the labour cost and the amount that a customer is prepared to spend on automation,” says Beeler.

One person making his mark on automation in finishing is Cliff Royle, from Melbourne’s Roylebind. He has developed a hybrid technology that blends the visuals and handling of case-bound covers with the ‘open-flat’ practicality of wiro binding. To achieve this, he had to modify the fiddly, traditional way of producing wiro hard cover.

Royle says it is now a high-speed process that allows more print and embellishment opportunities. Book designers have been impressed with the increased design flexibility.

“Now complete covers can be manufactured at astonishing speeds of up to 25,000 per hour,” says Royle.

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