Prison Shop Upgrades Bindery
North Carolina Correction Enterprises had one major concern with the tower collator in its Quick Copy facility.
“It never ran for any length of time without problems,” reports Jesse Mitchell, Quick Copy plant manager. “It was easier to manually collate.”
With 50 female inmates working two shifts, the in-plant certainly had the labor for this. But the manual method was time consuming, and the tax-supported state agencies that send work to the shop were demanding faster turnaround.
So the in-plant recently upgraded to a 12-station flat-sheet Setmaster Series 3 Compact collator with a Series 3 bookletmaker. It has made a world of difference. In the past, folding, collating and stitching were done separately; now they’re all part of one smooth process.
“My staff can set up the [machine] to do a book, and they’re pumping them out a whole lot quicker than they were when they were doing it by hand,” Mitchell says. The collator is rated for 2,800 cycles per hour.
The in-plant—which employs 12 state workers in addition to 50 inmates—opted for a horizontal collator to eliminate the right-angle turns sheets had to make when going through the previous collator. The static on the sheets would cause problems on these turns.
On the new horizontal collator, paper with static or moisture content is no problem. The machine can handle a wider range of media too, including 110-lb. card stock.
“It’s very rare to run a saddle-stitched book that’s not got a card stock cover,” points out Mitchell.
The collator can easily handle fifth cut tabs (five tabs across the 11˝ side of a sheet), he says. The in-plant does a lot of these.
“We can put different media together,” he adds “You can have a large sheet collated with a small sheet.”
The Setmaster features missed- and double-sheet detection and it also checks the thickness of finished books for consistency.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the new machine, though, is the part it plays in preparing inmates for employment once they’re released.
“We’re able to train an inmate on a piece of equipment that could help them to transition into the free society,” Mitchell says. “They’ll have working knowledge of a large bindery piece of equipment.”
- People:
- Jesse Mitchell
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
