Know When To Fold Them

Folding machines are built to last. But many that were sold in the 1980s don't have the tools needed to handle 21st-century work.

By W. Eric Martin

Folding and printing go hand-in-hand. Rarely is an item delivered from the press to the end user without being manipulated: letters must fit into envelopes; brochures and magazines must be folded before being trimmed; and holiday cards must be made mantle-ready.

While folding itself is fairly straightforward, knowing what you need from the equipment doing the folding can be a bit trickier.

Folding equipment seems to have an amazingly long life span, creating creases for decades before going kaput. John Baron, manager of Printing Services with the College of American Pathologists in Northfield, Ill., has been using a Heidelberg Stahl T52/4 with a right angle attachment since 1990 and a Baum 714 XE Ultrafold with a right angle attachment since 1997.

"With proper use and maintenance, they should last another 10-plus years," he predicts.

But folders marketed in the 1980s don't necessarily tout the tools an in-plant needs to handle every 21st century job that comes down the pike.

Nancy Zombolas, graphics and printing supervisor for the City of Rockville, Maryland, says her shop was outsourcing the folding of everything printed on coated stock due to problems with "scuffing" of the ink. Her 20-year-old Baum 417B folder had no way to manage right-angle folds, so those pieces also had to be outsourced. Zombolas recently replaced the shop's dinosaur with a new Baum 2020 pile feeder folder so all this work can be kept in-house.

Bill Hudson, branch director of printing for the Mississippi Department of Transportation Print Shop, which has nine employees in two locations and an annual budget of $1.1 million, is also looking to keep more folding work in-house after installing an MBO B21 folding machine in May 2003.

"The most common items that we print and fold are letters, brochures, newsletters and magazines, normally requiring single folds or three parallel folds at the most," says Hudson. "But prior to installing our new folding machine, we only had the ability to produce simple folds." He expects more challenging jobs now that his shop no longer needs to outsource fancy folding.

Age—and the malfunctions associated with it—led Jim Muchler, director of Administrative Services at Bucknell University, to install a Standard Horizon AFC folder in his Lewisburg, Pa., in-plant in 2003.

"We were replacing a 20-year-old machine that was simply worn out," he says. "The basic technology is unchanged. However, the short-run, on-demand digital environment we compete in today requires features that are simply not available on most of the older equipment."

Bring In The New

Folders may not have the same cachet as computers, but they've definitely changed over the past two decades. Features available on Muchler's new Standard folder include fold roller gap calipers, motor-driven fold plates, right angle capability and a touch-screen monitor with programmable memory.

"Total automation is crucial for maximum production," Muchler says. "Our runs are short, and changing from job to job has to happen very quickly."

Muchler, who oversees 23 employees in Administrative Services, including 10 devoted to printing, wants to see continued progress toward automation in folders of the future.

"Run lengths and turnaround times are all much shorter," he notes. "We need equipment that automates the setting of roller pressure and fold plates so that changeover from job to job involves minimum operator intervention."

Bill Hudson seconds that call for more automation.

"I would like to see a system on which settings for jobs that are printed and folded on a regular repeat basis could be programmed, eliminating the necessity of setting up every job," he says.

While complete automation lies in the future, Hudson's new MBO B21 folder has eliminated the need for his shop's existing perforating and scoring machine, as the MBO does perforating and scoring in addition to its namesake activity.

More importantly, says Hudson, the MBO will eliminate a folding faux pas that had been plaguing the shop.

"We print several jobs on our high-speed DocuTech 6135 printing system which require folding," he says. "This piece of equipment subjects paper to fairly high temperatures, which, in turn, has created folding problems due to a hardening and sometimes curling effect on the paper. This causes fish-tailing of the paper down the alignment table and results in folds that are less than square.

"This problem has been resolved due to a unique feature of the folding machine we purchased," Hudson continues, "that being the polyurethane spiral fold rollers which are designed to prevent this type of problem."

Hudson plans to purchase a right angle unit for the MBO so his staff can accomplish more complex folds.

John Baron, who already has right angle attachments on his machines, considers them essential. With a staff of eight and an annual budget of $2.3 million, Baron's shop produces the standard letters, newsletters and booklets one expects from an in-plant—but they also handle much tougher jobs, such as a recent 20-page 6x11˝ self-mailer that included numerous critical crossovers.

Hold On To Folding Money

As with any improvement or upgrade you consider, it all comes down to the bottom line: Are you saving your parent organization money and thereby demonstrating how essential the in-plant is to their day-to-day operations? For Bill Hudson, the answer is an unqualified yes.

"Before purchasing our new folding machine, the only multiple fold jobs that we were able to produce were folded on our tabletop folding machine, which required us to outsource higher-quality print jobs."

"Folding does not directly save our in-plant money," says Dean Fisher, print production team leader at Bucknell University, "but having extensive folding capacity does allow us to keep more work in-house, which does save our parent organization money."

Cost savings also come from time not spent handing the material off to another organization.

"We produce booklets daily that need to be half-folded, and we use our right-angle attachment on the back end of our booklet maker, an Omega Binder, to fold them inline," says John Baron. "Prior to this, we would outsource the folding or hand-fold, so this has really cut down on our turnaround time."

And for anyone in business, adds Fisher, "Time saved equals money saved."

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