Newbie to Cutting Business Cards - HELP!

[shaz]

Hi Guys

As graphic designers, we thought it would be practical to get a small digital printing machine to provide short run print to our clients.. it's printing great.. the problem I am having is the cutting!!

Today I printed some business cards on SRA3 sheets, I think it was 18 up per sheet...

Went to the cutter and spent over an hour trying all sorts of cutting angles only to end up with a batch of all oddly cut cards.. i.e the design had moved around alot as I had cut in differently into the bleeds with most of the cards.

Is there some system to cutting these? Is there a video available somewhere - been searching everywhere..

Also I put my hands up to buying a very inexpensive SRA3 electronic guillotine.. it doesnt come into the cutting area more than 50mm ... i.e. if I want to cut 20mm into a design it wont let me do it unless I position it well away from its wall (the back part) .. and when it does cut it leaves a horrible clamp mark all across in a long line -- is this normal? I only received it today...

Your help would be grreatly appreciated

Thanks

 

[RNRPRINTINGNMAILING]

I have to ask you are a designer correct?. And you do put crop marks for each card right?.
So after you print its very simple rules one of the sheets out You have make sure the job is square.
as far as the clamp marks put waste on top of the pile and then put your rule out on top( make sure the sheets are in the same direction. I always allow 1/4 all around. Also depending on how many cards your running, only cut about 1 1/2 inch of stock. Now you can check out Youtube and they do have videos on cutting.

Good Luck

 

[mattbeals]

Usually these cutters you can program your cuts into.

We always printed the cards centered on the sheet. Using an 8.5 x 11 page as a sample:

cut in half to 8.5w x 5.5 tall

The freshly cut edge became the "top" of the job that we would place against the back of the cutter so that we always had a square edge. We kept cutting things in half after that. I think we had a Polar that could hold 99 programs. Each program could contain a fairly large number of steps/"cuts". You should be able to do the same thing.

As long as your sheets are cut square, by you or the mill, and the back fence is square you should be able to do it all by typing in the coordinates and recording them. What I mean by square is that all the sides are 90 degrees. Otherwise your cuts will be at the wrong angle.

With your trim marks I would suggest that you align them numerically on center, not to the left or right of the line.

 

[shaz]

Hi

Thanks for the reply, that solves the clamping mark problem.. I wasnt sure if it was my cutter..

As for the cutting, yes all artworks have crop marks and are impositioned on the sheet correctly... but sorry for being dim... What do you mean by keeping the job square?

I have no preset facility in this cutter!

 

[RNRPRINTINGNMAILING]

Hey Matt your right about that.
But I trim down the outside first to square the sheet, and than the 3.5 in strips and than the 2 inch.
its easy and not complicated.
He is new and this would be a lot easier to figure out until he gets the hang of it.

 

[RNRPRINTINGNMAILING]

Most paper that comes from the mill is not square, I don't care what any one says.
You might not see it with the eye.
But when my guys are ready to run I have them trim the paper all around, I than know the sheet is square
I have them put tick marks on the sheet so I know there is no bounce when they are printing.

 

[shaz]

aaaahh... when I was pushing the pile of paper back on the cutter, the laser was giving me a non straight line!! I guess this explains the non-squareness of the paper?

I still dont get the best process of cutting 18 up (85,, x 55mm) business cards - if not to inconvenient would someone be kind enough to give me a graphics image as it is really hard for me to grasp the written directions

thanks!

(learnt 2 things!
1) removing the clamp mark
2) squaring off paper - thanks guys)!

 

[RNRPRINTINGNMAILING]

iF YOU GO TO YOU TUBE
THERE ARE A FEW VIDEOS ON CUTTING.
AND LIKE I SAID CUT THE OUTSIDE FIRST.
YOU CAN SAVE ONE CUT TRIM SIDES, WHEN YOU CUT EACH STRIP TO 3.5
EXAMPLE 3.5 WIDE AND 10.25 LONG JUST SET THE CUTTER TO 2 INCHES AND CUT IT IS THE EASIEST WAY TO CUT CARDS DOWN AND VERY EASY TO REMEMBER

 

[jotterpinky]

Unless you are gang running these cards there is absolutely no reason to print these cards 18-up. Most runs of cards are 500-1000 and the amount you save in print cost is more than used up by the extra time you spend cutting them. The smaller sheet will be easier to manage in the cutter and assuming you are printing these on a entry-level color printer you will have less paper curl and get squarer cuts.

The second thing is to print all cards with gutters, this will allow you to back-trim the cards so they will all be the same size. If you're using a programmable cutter this might be a moot point but if you have a manual backguage it's a must.

As for marking on the sheets we allow two or three sheets on top and bottom of the stack which we throw away as tare, more depending on the stock and how dense it is.

Finally make sure you have a good paper cutter. A good entry level cutter such as a Challenge or MBM will do well. However I've seen some of the older MBM equipment that is garbage so be careful. In high school I worked for a quick printer that had one as a backup cutter and it didn't have the balls to cut the full width of the blade (electric instead of hydraulic). It also cut at an angle downward so the top sheets were shorter than the bottom sheets. Also make sure that the backguage and side lays are square.

 

[JustPrint!]

Big thing is to make sure that your prints from your machine are not bouncy. Some office machines cannot handle thick stock, so the image will be all over the sheet.

 

[mattbeals]

See if these templates help.

 

[RNRPRINTINGNMAILING]

Hey Matt That was nice.
But you the more I think about it. something does not seem right.
if ( MR Newbie) just got a new machine and is running small amounts why would you print 18 up?,
and why not get a Business card slitter and run your cards 10 up (100 sheets = 1000 cards) hand feed
15 minutes, but this would be all of the research. it seems like we are all spinning our wheels on such a simple and yet common sense thing.
What do you think ??????????????

 

[shaz]

Hi

Thanks again for the replies

jotterpinky : Yes, normally we wouldnt be printing more than 500 or 1000 cards for a client, how many cards do you think we should keep on the sheet instead of 18? I guess it makes sense to keep it fewer up if it makes cutting easier..
My cutters minimum cutting area is 5cm so causes a problem with cutting the top edge of the sheet - is this minimum cutting area normal? as I only received the cutter yesterday and it wont let me get closer than 50mm...

You said to print all the cards with gutters.. my imposition software does this automatically - please see the attached picture - is this correct?

Please can you tell me what you mean when you say 'back trim the cards' ?

Thanks

 

[mattbeals]

these cards don't need to be printed with gutters. That's adding a lot of extra work for nothing. Since the style of the card is a flood of Red you can "dead cut" them. If the background was a pattern that varied then you may need gutters. There are other tricks that you can do to make cutting easy. Don't be affraid to rotate the cards to get the bleeds to share a common edge. See these samples for two ways you can handle them.

But I'm sure there is a reason to run them 18-up. It's a lot, but I'm sure there is a reason. A slitter would have been easier for business cards. We too would run them 10-up. The last shop I was at we had a programmable cutter so it was a snap to trim them.

Keep the number of cuts to a minimum, use common edges where you can.

 

[shaz]

Hi Matt

The RIP for the digital printer, allows us to drop in a pdf with bleeds and it impositions it to maximise sheet use..

Looking at your way (Thanks alot for taking the time to make the templates!) makes alot more sense for sure.. But is there an automated bit of software that could do this for us? Or you advise just knocking these together in indesign each time?

Also when I put the sheets against the back of the cutter, I noticed the laser line was not at the same angle as the prints.. but visually the prints looked dead straight.. does this come down to the issue of 'squaring' sheets? if so how is this done?

Thanks again guys - really appreciate it !!

 

[jotterpinky]

Matt, I agree that this design does not require gutters. However my experience with digital equipment is that the toner "chips" off the edges of all the cuts that were not under the clamp. This is most severe on coated stock with heavy coverage.

You are correct that adding gutters adds to the complexity of the cutting process and many cards will not need to have gutters. We simply do it for consistency sake.

 

[mattbeals]

Depending on the digital press itself you definitely can see cracking on the cut edges. You can use tools like Callas pdfToolbox (it also imposes amongst other features) or Quite Imposing. But neither of them will be smart enough to rotate the pages to suit a three sided bleed automatically. In Quite Imposing you can tell it to rotate the art as part of the imposition (90, 180, 270). If you want to do it "automatically" you'd need Quite Hot Imposing and make sure that you pick the right hot folder (imposition style is assigned to a set of folders).

It all depends on the art being printed and the way the bleeds are set up. Not all of them can use dead cuts. Often times the cards need to be trimmed the way the RIP imposed them.

Which RIP are you using?

Not sure which cutter you have but I'd suggest calling support/manufacture and asking them how to verify that everything is straight and true. Squaring the sheets usually requires you to trim the sheets out of a parent sheet. This way you can be sure that a sheet really is the correct dimension too. But since you're printing digitally the sheet isn't always going to be fed at a right angle and follow the same position (left and right, forward and back) as it would in a press. Presses are much more consistent in feeding all the way through the press. A friend of mine uses a Canon 7000 and says he gets great front to back, side to side registration.

 

[LoneGoose]

Have just stumbled upon this thread and thought I'd put in my 2 cents, if no one has mentioned this already...

Paper from the mills is usually grain long. The way you've imposed these, the cards are going to end up grain short. There's no right or wrong here, but my personal preference is to always end up with the grain running parallel to the long side of the card - it makes them feel stiffer.

Nicolas

 

[LoneGoose]

Woops, does the SG on the sticker on the pack stand for 'short grain'? My bad...

 

[easiprint]

Surprised to hear people say that these do not need to have gutters when they are digitally printed. Given the high coverage, I would always recommend gutters to ensure all edges are back trimmed, otherwise toner chipping on the edges, or even rough paper fibres, will result in a poor looking job. (OP - back trimming means that the good finished side is behind the blade when making a cut).

I have not come across any cutters that will not go smaller than 50mm. Mine goes to 20mm without a problem. What were the specs on the machine when you bought it?

Simon