St. Joseph's Beefs Up Bindery

Tom Malone had an excellent reason for wanting to replace his old paper cutter.

"It broke and could not be repaired," says Malone, production manager at St. Joseph's University's Philadelphia in-plant. After having the cutter's chassis rewelded a year before, he was disappointed, to say the least, when the machine broke again.

"I just was in the beginning of the production of a 500-page book, and I needed my cutter," he says. He managed to talk his boss into letting the 18-employee shop buy a new Heidelberg Polar 78X cutter. He has not been sorry. The features on the new model have made life a lot easier in the shop.

"We never had an airbed," he says. This sure helped on the book job, which required "thousands and thousands of sheets" to be cut, he says.

"The airbed was just a godsend," he adds.

He likes the programability of the cutter too. And the safety features, including sensors to stop the blade if the operator's hand strays too close, are wonderful, he says, and make a good impression on visitors.

"It looks better for the university that we are concerned about employee safety," Malone says.

The in-plant also replaced its tabletop folder with a new Heidelberg B20 Stahlfolder.

"Before, I don't really even feel like I had a folder," Malone says. "Now I feel like we can doprofessional folding that we really couldn't before. To come off our four-color [Ryobi] press and not have really top-notch folding capabilities afterwards just seemed limited to me, so I was really happy to put that piece of equipment in."

For one thing, it means the shop no longer has to outsource jobs requiring barrel folds or other more complex folds.

"But also, just as importantly, the folding looks better than it did before, and, in fact, I can score and fold in one step. I had a separate offline scoring machine that I used before. Now it scores and folds in one pass."

This is a particularly big help in folding large runs of greeting cards for one client, a job that used to require hand feeding through a scorer prior to folding.

"Now it's one pass," he says. "It's done in an hour."

The bindery isn't all that has been upgraded at St. Joseph's University. A year ago the shop added a Heidelberg Prosetter 52 CTP device.

"It's amazing," Malone says. "To not have to strip negatives any more in itself is incredible, but the quality factor that we've come away from this with is really also incredible."

Needless to say, all these purchases have made a lot of people at Heidelberg very happy.

"So all they're trying to do now is get me to buy a press from them," Malone laughs.