Hey folks, thanks for all your responses. I didn't get any notifications and came here looking for something else, so I just now noticed them.
I totally hear what folks are saying, re: the temporary drum situation. I actually have not been having that issue lately so my sense is that it's clearing up. My issue is not really the drums per se, because you can always hit a bad batch. That's just life. It's their communication. They offer no solutions to get their shops up and running. If we can't print we don't make money. In fact, we lose money. I don't need to tell anyone here that, but Xerox doesn't seem to care. Maybe if we were a much bigger shop with multiple machines, they would find a way. We're small fish. I know that in some ways their hands are tied but I just want them to communicate and take it seriously. Can they borrow a drum from another shop nearby to get us running? Is there another provider the next state or two over that they can get some from? etc. Maybe they think of all that, but they don't say it! So how am I to know?
With regard to the inline finishing, I hear that too. You're absolutely right that it is more expensive and it is tied to an engine. My thing is that we are very small and do a lot of different jobs, which we have to do in order to survive. Right now when a half-size booklet comes in, we print the covers 2up and then they get scored on a Heidelberg Windmill, meanwhile we print the interiors 2up and slipsheet them. Then we hand-collate the covers in and bring the books to an offline Plockmatic bookletmaker which has its own quirks and issues. If it's running well, a run of 500-1,000 booklets is no big thing. It trims inline as well. But for 100-200 booklets, the job has involved four machines and two people, taking several days. Wouldn't it make more sense from a labor perspective (and we are worker-owned, so this is not an "employee" situation I'm talking about, this is our own time and labor) to proof the job, and then have a finished booklet come out of the delivery? Then our time is freed up for other things. This is especially compelling in a pandemic when life gets disrupted and we are having to work fewer days and put out other supply chain fires, etc.
I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on how they make things more efficient at a small shop. Just seems like a lot of our time gets sucked up and we could manage it better.
I'll look into the machines that people have noted. I do like the V180. Maybe I can find a different service provider than the one we use, although I think they might be the only one in our geographic area.
- Lantz
I came from a Xerox shop with 6 machines, Xerox didn’t care about us either, not sure what the sweet spot is to get on their radar…my employer had the attitude that we should have tons of (worn out) equipment for “redundancy” while Xerox service had the attitude of “we don’t have to fix this machine today because your other machine is working.”
I am now with a small print dept…only have the KM6085 and inline slitter / creaser / booklet maker, and a handful of usual essentials. The inline slitter - great idea, would love to be able to have fully finished books come off the machine productively. However the quality of the slits is unacceptable, and service has been unable to correct it. It also is prone to jamming. And it has a cool feature where when the slitter malfunctions your entire printer is useless, it will slit pages unintentionally. It also will not handle mixed sized sheets for the same reason (the slitter has a homing position it constantly has to move to). We have to trim offline.
The creaser is inadequate, limited, and usually creates skewed books. We also have a Duplo 646 so we crease on that instead.
The inline booklet maker itself…is finicky, imprecise and creates an overly complicated paper path, and is limited in the amount of sheets it can handle…so while I do use the booklet maker for a few jobs, it is rare. Until we got our offline booklet maker a few months ago, most books had to be produced completely by hand and with a floor stitcher….
over the course of almost 5 years with the printer, they (I have only been here two years) have certainly not gotten good value out of the inline finishers because of the quality, reliability, and limitations…probably under 10000 booklets through that machine all for a sickingly huge added cost of that equipment (and all of that money flushed down the toilet as it gets replaced with the printer). The KM sales reps couldn’t believe me when I told them I wanted a simple offline booklet maker and not some giant expensive quirky thing attached to the printer….they assured me all the issues were worked out (I asked the technicians…they had a different story).
At the Xerox shop I was at previously, we had some inline booklet makers and stuff also…and it was much the same…if you could find the perfect cheesy little job for the device it would work well enough…not perfect, but when the thing had problems nobody could fix it and it was not quite good enough for many jobs where the quality mattered.
Obviously, you know your shop’s needs and can balance whether certain inline devices make sense, but that’s my own experience. For what we do the offline booklet maker is great, I’m rarely doing more than a few hundred at a time, it’s easy enough for me to print and trim and throw books through the machine. It’s a lot better than doing them on the floor stitcher…and having only one printer, I don’t want to tie it up all day for booklets, etc.
I had to reread the thread thinking it was Drums/Toner issue but it's the margin thing again. We've got real problems without dealing with manufactured ones.
