Team impression: Day 4

I spent most of today in finishing. First I was on the guillotine, this isn't anything like the guillotines in college its huge and can cut through a few hundred sheets of paper at a time. It's impressive how powerful and accurate it is, the precision of the cut looks really good. It seemed like it would be quite a tedious job to spend all day on it however.

Next I was put onto the folding machine, or I should say machines as its a whole set of different modules which can be put together in different was depending on what is being folded. We were working on a 16 page section of a book, which required 3 folds, they can do a few thousand in an hour and obviously the quality is really high. Very clever kit and it was really interesting to see how it worked. I also got to see how the laminator worked, its really just a very fast version of the laminator in college.

Then I got taken to unit 11 which is the, where they do die-cutting, foiling, embossing, and making up boxes and covers etc. which is know as paper on board. I got a real sense of the craft in this section particulaly with the foiling, it is definately a skill that takes a lot of practice and the people there take a lot of pride in their work.

The foiling, embossing and die-cutting machines are all old modified heildelberg letterpress machine. They work in a very similar way except the plates they use are heated and just push foil onto the paper. This is the room where a lot of the really high end beautiful print finishes happen, I'm going to be back there tomorrow.