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The issues of folding digital stock, and two solutions that may help –

When it comes to sourcing the best methods for folding digital stocks, don’t you just find that there simply aren’t enough suitable solutions in the market that meet your requirements? If you already own a creaser to deal with your low volume work, it probably isn’t an issue to fold such items by hand, or leave some of the sheets flat for the customer to take care of, such as greetings cards or leaflets? I guess that some of you who might see hand folding as something that can be slightly time consuming, cannot justify paying over the odds for some of the more elaborate solutions on offer in the market. The following two stories may help you to think of some more cost-effective, alternative folding techniques…

Desk top buckle folding

A few months ago I travelled over to Nottingham to see how one of our customers was getting on with his CreaseStream Mini Auto-feed and noticed straight away that two of his staff were hand folding the pre-creased leaflets they had just processed through the machine. Looking rather surprised at my interest, the owner of the company explained that this was just normal practice and part of their every day working life. In fact he seemed pretty proud of the fact that his employees were highly skilled and pretty fast in the art of hand folding, and he thanked me for enabling this to happen due to the quality of the creases coming from our machine. Ok, great in one sense, my customer was a lot happier than before he purchased our creasing machine, (he previously owned a desk-top bar creaser which was several times slower) however, it slightly frustrated me to see so much time was being eaten up during the folding stage of the firms overall production process. You see, I spent 20 years perfecting my own skills in the art of folding, through working for one of the leading print finishing companies in Europe and I knew straight away how I might help this company quicken things up. My customer confessed to the fact that he was priced out of the market after being offered a crease/fold solution for a premium price before he got in contact with CreaseStream.

The solution

Because this digital print firm printed on 150gsm stock I knew of a simple to use, desk top folding machine that would meet their price point and easily fulfil their expectations. I came across this friction fed folding unit during the IPEX exhibition, held in London earlier this year. It was the only machine I tested that could cope with feeding and processing pre-creased stock up to 250gsm in weight, for less than £2000. I felt sure that my customer could collect his pre-creased material straight from the delivery tray of his 4,000 per hour CreaseStream Auto-feed and then run them through even faster on this impressive little folder.
I hasten to add that my customer has since purchased the folding machine and is getting on great with it. I must balance out this happy story by telling you that this folding machine has its limitations and it can be a little temperamental when feeding some coated stocks, however my customer is more than satisfied. If you contact me via telephone or email I would be happy to pass on the contact information of the company that supplied it.

Plow folding

For those of you that don’t necessary know much about my background before I set up Tech-ni-Fold & CreaseStream, I used to be a folding operator fanatic. It was my everyday challenge to solve some of the most difficult finishing issues in Europe whilst working for one of the UK’s leading print finishers and I loved every moment of it. I have also part carried on my love of the art of folding by spending some of my research time over the past five years looking at alternative ways to fold digital materials, which brings me to the next solution I would like you to look at.

The solution

Plow folding is a method of folding usually found in direct mailing houses, where high volume personalised media is processed at top speeds. It utilises suction belts and “shoe horn” type devices to form the desired result.
The point I want to get across to you is that plow folding is known to be a little fiddly to set up, yet it is perfect when using it to fold heavier stock materials without damaging the spine of the fold. After three years of searching I found a great supplier and then purchased a unit. We then modified it to integrate with our CreaseStream Mini Auto-feed, and here is the result…

Our CreaseStream Auto-feed, shown in the video, feeds digital materials without marking or scuffing the toner. It lends itself very nicely to the plow folding mechanism.
Let me know your thoughts regarding the two folding solutions mentioned in this blog, it would be great to receive your invaluable feedback.