University Shop Punches 
Away Bindery Issues

When it came time for Oregon State University Printing & Mailing Services to produce an annual project for the state of Oregon, the shop was in need of a punching machine to handle binding duties for the 13,000 manuals.

The solution came in the form of a Sterling Digipunch from Spiel Associates, installed at the Corvallis, Ore.-based in-plant in August.

"We had an old punch, and it had seen better days," recalls Judy Bankson, production manager. "More importantly, we are doing a lot more coil-bound books that are color, and we don't have a punch on the color machines. That was one of the main reasons we bought the [Sterling Digipunch]."

The new addition to the in-plant's bindery was a key component to finishing the manual job for the state.

"We run it two-up, 11x17˝, all black," Bankson notes. "We just got done running all of that through the new machine."

The 25-employee shop, which recently welcomed Ari Grossman-Naples as its new director, is using the Sterling Digipunch to produce course packs, booklets, day planners and handbooks for almost every department on campus.

"We do just about everything for the university as a full printing and mailing facility," Bankson points out, estimating that the shop has already done 750,000 punches using the Sterling Digipunch.

Color work at the university in-plant is handled by a Xerox iGen3 and a Ricoh Pro C901, while black-and-white materials are produced using a team of Canon imageRUNNER units.

"Both my black-and-white machines have punches on them when I run 81⁄2x11˝," Bankson says. "But neither of our color machines have the coil- or comb-punching capabilities on them."

The Sterling Digipunch allows for punching up to 60,000 sheets per hour, and can punch sheets with covers or tabs intermixed. A touch screen offers automatic setup and changeovers. It can punch sheets of multiple sizes for comb, coil and double-loop wire.

Bankson contends that a big hurdle for the shop when making any purchase is having the machine serviced, due to the in-plant's location.

"We are kind of out in the middle of nowhere," she says. "I wasn't going to buy it without a maintenance contract. But, so far, it punches pretty well."