Although a relative newcomer to the mainstream bookbinding machinery sector, Risetec’s father-and-son management team represent the perfect partnership of experience and innovation. Chiarino Masuri has a background that includes working with some of the industry’s leading manufacturers at shop-floor, technical support and sales consultancy levels, where he formed an intimate understanding of the production and quality control issues that challenge customers as they work under constant pressure to ever tighter deadlines. His son, Diego, brings prodigious engineering insight and advanced CAD design skills to the equation and, together, they are responsible for some of the most significant developments in bookbinding technology of recent years.
These include the remarkable ONE•LINE> a fully automated binding and trimming line with seemingly endless capabilities that include perfect binding for soft covers, endpapering and backlining to produce book blocks for casing-in, pre-trimming and creasing of cover sheets (including with flaps), mark-reader verification of correct cover-to-book-block, self-setting 3-knife trimming for varying product runs, and much more. The Risetec ONE•LINE> allows binderies to achieve a faster return on investment as it expands their product range and/or replaces several older machines with one multi-purpose automated system. The SUPER D DeStacker is another of the Risetec innovations that promises to supercharge production efficiency as it brings a cost-effective and reliable solution to the persistent problem of de-stacking piles of pre-formed book blocks for individual downstream processing. The team at Risetec welcomes input from customers in the drive to track down and demolish production bottlenecks, wherever they occur.
Steve Giddins of PBS (left) with Diego Masuri at Risetec’s head office in Lentate sul Seveso, Milan
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ALL THINGS BOOK
Perfect Bindery Solutions offers a specialism in book binding equipment under the motif
‘all things book’. Partner Steve Giddins brings to the table a lifetime of intimate understanding of bindery processes – from hands-on operation and mechanical engineering to service, manufacture and sales. His most recent initiative for seasoned industry practitioners and prospective customers are two illustrated workflow charts for
on-demand and
long run book production – soft cover and hard case – that show all the possible processes involved, where they sit in relation to each other and the levels of automation and integration available:
“We decided to create these resources because we were aware that the nature of the market had changed quite significantly over the last five or ten years, and new machines with different capabilities were being brought forward at an ever-increasing pace,” says Steve Giddins. “Specialist binding houses are busy places and no-one has the time to keep abreast of every new development – for them, these aids are a handy road map. At the same time, because of the newer automated short-run binders now available, book binding has come to be seen as a promising potential revenue stream for general commercial printers to bring in-house. But we were finding that, when they start to think about adding value to differentiate their service or exploit niche markets – such as offering covers with flaps, hard back books, round-cornering or adding ribbons and straps – there was quite a lot of confusion about what was involved… these charts simplify all that so our discussions can become more focussed.”
PBS claims that a prime example of the rapid pace of innovation in this sector is the new
Risetec/IML ONE•LINE> binding system it world launched at TPS last year:
“This system is unique in the variety of options that it offers the user,” continues Steve Giddins. “Not only does it perfect bind for soft cover books, but it can add endpapers and back line for casing in, too. The book blocks can be fed in by hand or automatically via a conveyor… it measures the thickness and sets itself for all the milling, gluing and cover parameters. And then there are options for pre-trimming the covers, feeding covers with flaps, and so on. The 3-knife trimmer can also work in-line with a barcode or mark reader to select the cutting dimensions of each book in sequence. With this level of versatility it represents the single most valuable investment that should be at the heart of every serious book production operation going forward.”
The ONE•LINE> is available in single, four or seven clamp models with a variety of near-line or in-line 3-knife trimmers to suit the levels of production, and can be integrated into a wider automated workflow, as shown by the PBS flowcharts, for an almost endless variety of product options.
As its ‘all things book’ slogan implies, the PBS product range offers solutions for every area of the book production workflow including: sewing, trimming, cloth and board cutting, round cornering, ribbon and elastic strap inserting, casing in, book pressing and the IS fastBook specialist lay-flat machine for books with seemless cross-page spreads.
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Mission Statement
