Specialty Finishing — End of the Line
"It's a higher-volume machine, because setups are going to be a little more intense, as far as changing over sizes," Landheer notes. "It's a lot less operator driven. We do many schoolbooks in the summer, and we get a lot of high-volume runs out in a short period of time. This was really the best option for us, without spending a million bucks."
Index Tabbing
Index tabs aren't what they used to be, and Roger Kennedy didn't want to find himself on the outside looking in. Thus, the president of Charles Luck Envelope, in Forest Park, IL, made the investment in a Model AAT Auto Tabber from Advent Machine and Tool.
"Index tabs that people are putting together now have extensive body copy and color inks, all over the whole sheet, where in the past most of the index tabs were plain white with some black printing up where the tabs were," he says. "By doing the so-called body copy and the colors all over the entire sheet, the AAT does not run the whole sheet under hot pressure rollers like some of the other tabbing machines do. [The AAT] only puts the heat and pressure where the tab is, and we're able to run jobs through there without softening the inks and offsetting them, whereas we might run into trouble on the other-styled machines."
The AAT features a simple, dual-platen design instead of dozens of heated rollers, providing versatility to produce jobs of gloss or coated stocks and quick turnover for full-bodied printing jobs. The dual-platen design features an upper and lower heater with fully automatic temperature control. The platens provide for self adjustment and alignment for all types and thicknesses of stock, thus reducing setup times between jobs.
Other features include computerized control of all machine functions, air pile feeder with double sheet detection/ejection, and keyed reset and preset batch counters to monitor output.
