Carleton Upgrades Folder

After 23 years of hard work, the Stahl folder at Carleton University Graphic Services was showing its age. Coming from the pre-automation era, setup was entirely manual on the 25˝ folder, which led to some lengthy makereadies. Plus it was very noisy.

“When it was going, you needed to wear some earmuffs for sure,” remarks Bob Tippins, manager of Graphic Services at the Ottawa, Ontario-based university. “It served us well,” he reflects—but still, he adds, “it was time to look at updating.”

So in May, the 15-employee in-plant installed a new Standard Horizon AFC-566FKT folder. It features advanced setup automation through a color touch-screen control panel that displays fold formats and sheet sizes for easy selection.

Tippins says he spotted the folder at the Print World trade show in Toronto and was able to negotiate a good deal on it.

“The full automation feature is the one that really attracted us to it,” he says. This allows almost any of his employees operate the device. They can call up jobs from the folder’s memory, enabling quick changeovers. Tippins expects the shop’s productivity to increase because of the new folder.

“We can certainly turn around jobs quicker for our institution,” he notes—as well as for the 30 percent of the in-plant’s customers who hail from outside the university.

The new folder offers other advancements over the old one, as well. It can perf and score in several positions, all in one pass. Plus, it is made to handle sensitive digitally imaged sheets without marking, such as pieces produced on the in-plant’s Konica Minolta C8000 and C6500 digital color presses. The in-plant also runs a four-color, 29˝ Heidelberg PM74.

“We have a beautiful mix of digital and offset in our facility, which allows us to do almost every piece that the university produces,” Tippins says.