Watkiss Slimvac

[BarryScarborough]

I have recently bought a used Watkiss Vario Slimvac, suction feed, booklet making system with 16 bins from a local printer. It has not been heavily used and shows few signs of wear.

It successfully collates a variety of different stocks including gloss art, however when using the booklet maker, it fails to 'knock up' accurately art paper. Uncoated stocks work fine but art paper does not.

We have had Watkiss engineers trying and replacing various parts for 2 days and they have been unable to successfully produce booklets from gloss art stocks. They have also stated that they have nothing further to suggest.

Has anyone had a similar experience or is anyone successfully producing booklets on a Watkiss Vario Slimvac on gloss art?

Anyone any ideas or suggestions please?

 

[Craig]

Berry, are you located in the US? If so I have a person you could talk to.

When you are referring to gloss art stock are you talking about 100lb (150gsm) gloss text? I have a 12 bin Slimvac and run gloss text and cover through the Bookmaster Pro without problems. Do you have a static issue that is causing the sheets to stick together?

 

[lfelton]

Barry, if Craig's suggestion about the static (if it's digital print, that would be my #1 suspect too) doesn't help, then this *might* help you troubleshoot:-

Is it struggling on all jobs or only certain ones? In my experience, bookletmakers like this have pretty basic paper handling capability, so with coated stocks will tend to struggle on things like landscape booklets, small booklets or booklets with a high pagination. Last year we spent big bucks upgrading our machinery to resolve exactly these issues. If you can't do a basic 8PP portrait orientation booklet on gloss coated stock and the machine spec says it will do gloss coated stock, then obviously I'm way off base and just ignore the above.

Final thought (don't take offence ) - are you 100% sure that your paper is cut square and consistently? I've seen jobs where it looked like the bookletmaker wasn't knocking up accurately and in fact the cause was poor paper cutting (wrong clamp pressure).