Bindery, also known as finishing, is the final stage of the printing process. It is the final check point in the printing process and every job makes it to this stage even if it's only for packaging.

Bindery often consists of a lot of man-hours spent hand collating, folding, hole-punching, laminating, trimming, binding, stapling, etc. For jobs that can be automated special finishing equipment is enlisted.

Super Fold

Trifold brochures, newsletters, handbooks are just a few of the materials the MBO folder can produce at up to 20,000 pieces per hour and up to a sheet size of 14" x 18."

The towers of our Horizon Collator (shown left) is just a section of the large collating machine. All jobs with multiple pages (School handbooks, for example) are printed and then collated separately. For example 500 copies of a handbook is being printed. Each page is printed onto tabloid (11" x 17") paper. There are 40 total pages (one 11" x 17" = four 8½ x 11 pages). 500 copies of sheet 1 are printed, 500 copies of sheet 2 are printed, and so on. Each finished stack is placed into our Horizon Collator and then sorted in order ("collated"). We can collate up to 24 sheets at a time. For jobs which require more than 24 sheets, each collated section is collated mechanically and then hand-joined ("married") to complete the booklet. Once the pieces are assembled, they can then be stitched (stapled) or prepared for other types of binding (GBC spiral, Xerobind, Plastikoil). For collated jobs that do not need to be "married", our Horizon collator can fold and then stitch automatically.

There's a lot involved, but it's all just a part of the bindery process!