'The Simplest Approach to Punching'

It’s tough to rely on a punch that can’t handle tabs and constantly misfeeds. That was the case with Frank Oliver’s old punch. “It wasn’t working very well at all,” says Oliver, print shop supervisor for the Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego Board of Cooperative Educational Services. “I was just looking for a better machine that had the simplest approach to punching paper.”

He found it in the Alpha-Doc automatic punch, from Spiral Binding Co. The 12-employee in-plant added the punch to its Norwich, N.Y., facility in November. Capable of producing 48,000 punched sheets per hour, it features a turnover device to keep pre-collated document pages in the right order.

“That machine is...the best punch I’ve seen because it’s such a simple design,” he lauds.

It can be easily adjusted to accommodate the different book sizes of the student planners, test review packets and other learning materials that the shop produces for some 60 rural school districts across New York state.

And as for tabs...they’re a piece of cake, Oliver says.

“With the Alpha-Doc there’s these pins that you just loosen by hand, and you can adjust the pins so they miss the tab,” he describes. “It’s a really simple design.”

A lot of the in-plant’s jobs have tabs, he says, so the ability to handle them was a key factor in the decision to get the Alpha-Doc.

“It just whips right through those,” he says.

He likes that the Alpha-Doc feeds from the top of the pile and jogs the paper before punching it. The speed can be adjusted too.

“It holds quite a bit of paper, so you can stack in quite a few jobs and just hit the button and go,” he remarks. “I can have any of my people, even people that aren’t really familiar with the bindery, run the machine.”

The in-plant runs three two-color offset presses and an envelope press, plus three black-and-white copiers and one color copier. It produces an average of 2.7 million copies per month, says Oliver.