With the printing complete, the next steps were to cut the printed text sheets to final size and then collate the sheets into signatures in preparation for sewing.
Cutting
To cut the pages to size, we used our ancient Challenge 193 guillotine paper cutter, just like the one in the video at right. Our cutter is in a space that makes it impossible to get decent pictures so you're just going to have to take our word for it. As the video shows, using the cutter is straightforward:
Having one of these in the printshop is almost a requirement. It's practically impossible to cut paper accurately by hand in any reasonable quantity. |
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With a guillotine cutter a large cutting job is no big deal. Once you set it up (essentially just setting the back fence), you can cut stack after stack of paper and the sheets will all be the same size.
Consistency in the sheet size is critical when you get to the binding step. If the sheets are all different sizes, getting the them lined properly so they can be sewn together is very painful, if not impossible.
Here, we had to remember to cut the end sheets at the same time we cut the text sheets so that they would be the same size, too.
Consistency in the sheet size is critical when you get to the binding step. If the sheets are all different sizes, getting the them lined properly so they can be sewn together is very painful, if not impossible.
Here, we had to remember to cut the end sheets at the same time we cut the text sheets so that they would be the same size, too.
Collating
The sewn signature for each Passporto consisted of 7 leaves:
The sewn signature for each Passporto consisted of 7 leaves:
- 1 endsheet (plain 95# Plike)
- 1 title/photo/colophon (laser printed 70# Speckletone)
- 5 plain visa (laser printed 70# Speckletone)
The process of gathering these in the proper order is called collating. There's not a whole lot to it. Big stacks of each kind of sheet. Counting to 1 twice. Counting to 5 once. Repeat. A lot.
This shot is from collating JoCo Passporto 2023 (remember that part about not taking very many pictures this year?). The process was a little different last year in that we folded all the pages before we collated them. This year we experimented with different folding strategies and concluded that we could just wait until the sewing was complete and fold the entire signature all at once. |
Ready for sewing? Let's get on with it.