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Lassco CR-50XP Pnueumatic Corner Rounder (CR-50XP)
When you need high-speed corner rounding production, give the Lassco CR-50XP Pnueumatic Corner Rounder a go. This baby is a fully-automatic pneumatic machine, which means it cuts fast and can cut some heavy materials. It’s designed to cut paper and plastic, and can cut 60 strokes per minute. So if you’ve got a high-production print shop, the Lassco CR-50P Electric Corner Rounding Machine is for you.
How is it Used?
?The Lassco CR-50XP Pnueumatic Corner Rounder cuts up to 80 PSI, and includes one standard cutting die (1/8″, 1/4″, 3/8″, 1/2″) unit of your choice, and has 6 speciality dies available from 1/16″ to 1-1/2″.?
And How Much Does it Cost
The Lassco CR-50XP Pnueumatic Corner Rounder is $1705.50 at Lloyd’s, and comes with a 1 year manufacturer’s warranty.
Lassco CR-50 Manual Corner Rounding Machine (CR-50)
The Lassco CR-50 Manual Corner Rounding Machine isn’t for everyone. If you’ve got a high-production print shop, and need to do a lot of cutting and corner rounding, the Lassco CR-50 is the one for you. It’s a floor model, so it’s made for durable, rugged use — the kind of tough use that a high-production shop can dish out.
How is it Used?
The Lassco CR-50 Manual Corner Rounding Machine is designed to cut everything from paper to plastic. It includes one standard cutting die (1/8″, 1/4″, 3/8″, 1/2″) unit of your choice, and there are 9 optional speciality dies from 1/16″ to 1-1/2″.
And How Much Does it Cost
The Lassco CR-50 Manual Corner Rounding Machine is $733.50 at Lloyd’s, and comes with a 1 year manufacturer’s warranty.
Using “Theory of Delays” to Stop Wasting Time, Start Increasing Revenue
I was recently given an article by Vincent Bozzone at Delta Dynamics, Inc. (you can download the PDF version here) that has me rethinking how we manage our processes around here. According to the article, the two main theories in workflow and process management are Lean Manufacturing and Theory of Constraints (TOC).
Lean manufacturing is all about reducing inventory in mass production, by using on-time delivery of raw materials and supplies. TOC is about eliminating constraints that bottleneck the workflow in a job shop environment — someone doesn’t show up for work, or a customer changes some specs, and you’ve got a bottleneck.
But what do you do if you’re a custom job shop? Unless you’re the bottleneck, there’s really not much you can do to be lean or focus on TOC.
Bozzone says that by concentrating on the Theory of Delays (TOD), custom job shops can improve performance by cutting lead time. That by eliminating delays in the total business process will shorten the amount of time it takes to get paid. Shorter lead times lead to increased sales, reduced costs, and increase your overall capacity.
For printers, especially custom printers (and aren’t we all these days?), Theory of Delays sounds like something we’ve been complaining about for years. But Bozzone is telling us how we can focus on even one or two areas to improve performance. It all depends on how we look at our shop, as a manufacturer or a service company:
Recognizing this difference is very important because if you approach the challenge of improving the performance and profitability of a job shop with the idea of it being a manufacturing company, you will naturally look for ways to improve how it produces product. On the other hand, if you approach it recognizing it as a service company, you will look for ways to improve how it satisfies market and customer demand.
So what are some common delays found in most print shops? Quoting is usually a problem for shops, because the owner usually has to okay the quotes, but is busy racing around trying to get the day’s projects done. One solution might be to give your staff permission to approve their own quotes, as long as they’re under a certain dollar amount — say $500 — which will lighten the approval load for the owner, and shorten the quote time for the customer.
Maybe there is a delay on the floor because work that was completed at one stage of the operation is still sitting at the station, waiting to be picked up by the next operator. Examine your process, and see if there is another way to resolve this delay. Have the first person deliver the stock to the next station. Post a job board in a public area, and make everyone mark off when they’re finished. Ring a big bell. Just do something to let the next person in the operation know it’s their turn.
By focusing on the areas that cause you delays in the entire business process and not just on the manufacturing process or supply inventory, you can find other ways to shorten the time from “quote to cash,” and come up with new ways to increase revenue and capacity, but without spending longer hours in the office.
A Graphic Designers’ Binding and Print Finishing Cheat Sheet
Avoid wasting money by knowing a bit about binding and print finishing
In producing sizable publications, what happens in the last step — the print finishing and binding process — has to be considered in the first step — the design phase. Graphic designers who fail to do this will inevitably design publications in which the text and images end up in the wrong place. The result can be costly re-design, re-printing and re-binding work.
(I’m grateful to Christopher James Noble, Director of CMYKreative in the UK, who covered this subject in detail in an article.)
To avoid wasting time and money, the designer should know something about each type of binding and print finishing and the bindery equipment required for the job. To summarize, in professional print finishing and binding, here are the most common processes:
Saddle stitching is simple and cheap and often all that’s needed. Loose sheets are laid over a saddle-like holder where staples are forced through the spine of the pages at a very rapid rate. The more pages in the publication, the more likely pages will “creep” as they move through the process. So you should allow for larger margins, particularly if the outside edge of the bound job is to be trimmed flat.
Side-stitch binding is similar to saddle stitching, except that the staple is forced through the sides of the pages near the folds instead of through their spines. The resulting binding is not quite as nice as saddle stitching, so don’t use this if you’re releasing this to an audience who needs to be impressed by your work. Plus, this will chew up a lot of margin space, so allow for at least a 1.5″ inside margin.
Perfect binding starts with all of the project’s pages placed together and stitched through the spine. Then the spine edge is ground flat and the cover is glued on. While page creep is less of a concern, wider inside margins may be needed to prevent page content from disappearing into the center of the publication, particularly if there are many pages.
Case binding is almost the same as perfect binding, with the added step of reinforcing the spine with a cloth strip before attaching the cover. Treat it like perfect binding when laying out margins.
In comb binding, the plastic teeth of a comb are inserted into rectangular holes punched along the edge of the pages. This allows the finished publication to lie flat when open and the spines can be removed and reattached. But adding a printed spine is difficult and wider inner margins are needed to keep text and images away from the holes. If you want to do a two-page spread of data or images, don’t. If you have to, cut the image or data, figure the margin space, and have the information jump the page. Otherwise, you lose important information in the holes and the comb.
Coil or spiral binding involves threading a wire or plastic spiral through round holes punched in the edges of a stack of the pages. This method also allows the finished publication to lie flat when opened. The inner margins of pages must be wide enough to prevent punching holes into page content, and it’s very hard to add a printed spine. Again, it’s hard to have a two-page spread for data or a photo, although it can be done. The problem is getting two lines of data, like a spreadsheet, to line up properly, especially on a spiral. If you have to do that, consider. . .
Wire binding uses tooth-like loops of wire in a fashion similar to comb binding, but produces a much sturdier binding. Plus, the pages open perfectly in line, so you can keep lines of data perfectly aligned.
Post binding is simply a few metal posts pushed through punched holes in the pages and anchored with bolts that thread into the center of the posts. The final publication can have an external cover with an imprinted spine. Pages can be added or removed easily. Again, what’s printed on each page could be lost from view in the center if the interior margins are not wide enough. Figure a 1.5″ inside margin here too.
How a Wide Format Printer Can Increase Print Shop Profitability
As a distributor and fan of wide format printers like the Legend 72HUV UV curable printer/a>, I can’t help but be excited about all the different things this printer can do.
For one thing, it can make a print shop more profitable. Not just because it’s a new piece of equipment with some great benefits and cool features, like printing with ultraviolet curable ink, or specialty sign printing.
We’re actually seeing a lot of cut sheet/sheet-fed printers switch to wide format printing, because they can offer their customers so much more.
For one thing, you can run small signs on the Legend 72HUV. Rather than turning away large print formats, you can now accept poster print jobs for theaters and bands, signs for special events, and even specialty projects like 11×17 brochures.
We have a customer in Ohio who said that as a sheet-fed printer, he has to run $10,000 of sheet fed paper just to make $1,000 in profit. That’s because his margins are already so low, and he’s losing a lot of profit in labor and production costs.
But if he were to switch over to a wide format printer, he would only need to do $2,000 in printing to make $1,000 profit.
Because the wide format printer is so new, and is very inexpensive compared to other printing equipment, if you can add a 20% – 30% margin, you can pay for the machine in a year. (And 40% margins are not unheard of with this printer either.)
If you’re interested in more information on the Legend 72HUV wide format printer, visit us at WideFormatRevolution.com, or call us at (877) 626-6848.