Team Impression 6

Today I spent a day in finishing which was really interesting. The first machine I got to grips with were the big guillotines, they can slice with up to 4000 pounds of pressure and go through hundreds of sheets at a time. Apparently the blades are hardened steel with a tungsten tip, they get sharpened about once every two weeks and apparently when they're first sharpened they can slice 0.25 of a millimeter from a stack of paper, the off-cuts are like hair it's incredible. Obviously these machines are amazingly dangerous are there are some pretty gruesome stories in the trade, they're fitted with really sophisticated safety mechanisms though to make sure as little as possible can go wrong. Firstly there is a huge light sensor using infa-red light all the way across the front area of the machine, the blade won't operate if the light is broken and if anything passes through the light while the machine is being operated then the blade stops dead. Also apparently one of the biggest dangers comes about when two people are using the machine together, the stop this happening the machines are fitted with two buttons that both have to be pressed together to make the blade go down. This is for two reasons, firstly to make sure that both your hands are away from the blade while it is working and also the buttons pass a small electric current through your body to complete the circuit and make the machine work. If two different people press a button each it wont work as the circuit won't be complete. They are fitted with are air-beds all the way underneath to make passing large stacks of paper over the surface easy and in line, they also have a big back wall which is programmed to adjust to a certain distance from the blade each cut so that the paper can be lined up and cut in the exact same position each time. The guys also use a big electric jogger which is like a tilted rumbling table, this gets air in between all the sheets and shuffles them all into a perfectly straight pile before a lever pushes all the air out so make a flat, neat stack.

I also spent some time on the folding machines which are also really interesting, they work by feeding paper from a conveyor belt through a series of plates (each plate does a fold) these particular machines were called buckle folders are the paper up the plate to where it will be folded then buckled over. There is three parts to the machine which can be attached or taken away and fitted in different directions in order to be able to do nearly an series of folds, for example if a sheet comes in a needs to be folded twice vertically then once horizontally it will go into the first part of the machine, get buckled on two of the plates, then transfer along into the second part and get buckled once again in the different direction. Each part of the machine has around seven plates which are be active to perform a fold or turned off so the sheet will just deflect off that plate and not be folded. So potentially you could do about 7 folds in each direction without a problem. While I was helping out on these machines we were having some trouble setting up a job, it was a 6pp three panel leaflet for an anniversary event for a theatre, it was really nicely designed and had a beautiful gold fold stamp on the front, and the designers had gone for a really thick (300gsm) card, while this felt nice to the touch, it was actually causing a lot of problems in the machine as card this thick simply doesn't fold very well, it is far too springy and doesn't stay folded which was causing one of the folds to box (get smaller messy folds and marks around the main fold) and was also causing it to scuff certain parts as it went through. It took us quite a while of fiddling with the speed and pressure of the buckles to get it sorted but we got there eventually.