Riding the Finishing Line

These days, thanks to increased automation and faster makeready time, as well as because of a shortage of skilled workers, printers are buying saddle stitchers and vertical collators to streamline their postpress work.

This trend is a departure from practices of about 10 years ago, when many small to medium-size printers considered saddle stitchers too bulky and expensive to maintain on site.

One such printer is Middlesex, N.J.-based Capital Printing, which in recent months has been running two mammoth L-shaped saddle stitchers for high-volume postpress operations. These "monster machines" take up about 20,000 square feet of space within Capital's bindery department, sending signatures or inserts of products like brochures and catalogs through an automated heavy metal assembly line.

There, the signatures are fed from pockets, gathered, and stitched (stapled) by flying stitching heads. Then the binding line makes a sharp right turn under a three-knife system where the products are trimmed at the head, foot, and face, then shuttled to the end of the line to be boxed by human hands.

Capital's older saddle stitcher was made by Muller Martini. The new machine, an updated version of an old Muller Martini design, is a Vijuk Equipment 321-T saddle stitching system. The latter, which operates at about 10,000 cycles per hour, is made in China and sent through Hong Kong en route to the firm's U.S. distributor near Chicago, where the huge device premiered in 1999 at the Graph Expo show.

Prices vary depending on the number of pockets and options ordered, but a middle-range acquisition is about $187,000, according to Vijuk product manager Mark Agresta.

"Our volume requires us to have more than one saddle stitcher," explains Todd Zolla, production coordinator for Capital, a medium-size commercial printer. "We used to send everything out, but for the last several years we've found that it makes more sense to have bindery equipment in house. One reason is turnaround time."

Zolla adds, "We found that we gained more flexibility when the saddle stitchers are here with the presses. We can print on the first shift, fold and bind on the second, and truck a job out to the customer the next. This is a control issue as well as a huge financial issue because the more we can do in house, the more money we make."

Sometimes only one or two people work gigantic signature devices, as is the case with Heidelberg's ST 90 saddle stitcher, one of four machines in the company's Stitchmaster product line.

"Ultimately, most users would like to have two operators on the line, but it can be run by one person," says Gary Toney, director of the printing services department at the University of Southern Mississippi, which has been using an ST 90 machine for five years.

"One person can pretty much keep the pockets loaded while another can monitor the stitched products coming off the line," Toney adds, noting that the device, which has six pockets and a cover feeder, replaced a 10-pocket machine.

The ST 90, which has been evolving since the 1970s, processes about 9,000 signatures per hour. An updated base model aimed at the entry-level market is priced at about $150,000.

Heidelberg's faster and more versatile ST 270 saddle stitcher, which bowed in 1999 and is rated at 11,500 cycles an hour, also targets small and middle-size shops. It has a four-pocket configuration and starts at about $250,000, according to Steven Calov, Heidelberg's product manager for stitching and perfect binding equipment.

Calov says that Heidelberg may introduce a two-tower collator called the Stitchexpert at the Print 01 show in Chicago this fall.

"The Stitchexpert unit would be for the small printer that doesn't need a conventional saddle stitcher," Calov says.

"It's perfect for in-plant use, like insurance companies that have an in-house printing department and need to bind a book. The investment cost is lower than it is for a traditional saddle stitcher," he says, noting that the price would be competitive.

Collators, which are made and marketed by such companies as Duplo U.S.A. and C.P. Bourg, differ markedly in size and operation from the traditional L-shaped signature machines.

"A true saddle stitcher gathers several signatures or folded sheets into a final finished form for binding," observes Fritz Knepper, a regional sales manager for C.P. Bourg, which has five different types of collators in its product line, with vacuum-fed models like the BST-D being the most popular. "Collators, on the other hand, take multiple single sheets of paper and fold it one time."

Also, collators only trim one side, whereas signature saddle stitchers typically trim three sides of the product.

Mike Meyers, production manager for Beard Publishing, York, Pa., says his company purchased a two-tower SpeedVAC collator, manufactured by Horizon and distributed by Standard Finishing Systems, to replace a slower collator. Meyers says it fits his company's needs "because we wanted something heavy-duty and efficient."

Meyers notes that the machine averages about 1,500 to 2,000 pieces an hour on products like home warranty booklets. The device comes with a Horizon SPF-20 bookletmaker, a FC-20 face trimmer, and an ST-60 dual-pile stacker.

"Generally it takes two people to run the machine, depending on the job," he says, adding that shrink-wrapping is done by hand. However, Meyers says that his company, space permitting, may purchase a high-volume saddle stitcher next year to handle increased business. "An L-shaped Muller Martini machine would stitch 10,000 to 15,000 pieces an hour," he says.

Mark Hunt, director of marketing for Standard, acknowledges that the traditional L-shaped signature machines are faster and can accommodate larger-volume runs than the SpeedVAC, the flagship for his company's line of vertical collators.

"A machine built by Muller Martini occupies the high-volume arena," he says. "They will beat us on speed and number of physical sheets, but on a 22-sheet job, we think we'll beat them every time. Their machines are big and long; they take a lot of labor to set up and change. Ours offer quick set-up and changeover, and dramatically save space because the two towers take up only four square feet, and you need only a single operator."

Donna St. John Berry, marketing manager for Muller Martini's U.S.-based operation, says that automated features in today's L-shaped saddle stitchers have greatly reduced makeready time.

"In the old days, it did take a long time to set up the machine," she states, "but now makeready happens in record time," which she declined to specify, although one industry source estimates that the start-up time for most models on the market tends to be about 45 minutes, down from as much as three hours in decades past.

St. John Berry notes that her 55-year-old company, which is based in Zofingen, Switzerland, offers a wide range of custom saddle stitchers, such as the Minuteman, Presto, and Bravo-T, which are aimed at mid-size and smaller shops.

But she points out that the Muller Martini Bravo-T has a "wider range in the kind of work it can do," producing up to 11,000 products per hour. And although it can be configured with up to 14 pockets, says St. John Berry, "You might get away with one or two operators if it was a simple job like two signatures."