Students meet their deadlines with Ashgate’s Fastbind Elite perfect binder

Print Solutions

The Digital Print Bureau at the Bower Ashton Campus of the University of West England in Bristol has installed a Fastbind Elite XT perfect binding system from Ashgate Automation for the use of its art, media and design department.

‘We are a large arts faculty with a big demand for binding books, booklets, sketch pads and sketch books. Until we bought the Elite XT our arts, graphics and photographic students produced them by hand or outsourced them to a bookbinder, which was expensive,’ explained Rebecca Hill, team leader, Digital Print Bureau. ‘The subject was raised on a staff development course and I was tasked to find a simple, affordable solution to speed up the process, which could be used by the students while, at the same time, enabling us to offer an in-house service for the department and teaching staff.’

Having researched several perfect binding machines, the Fastbind Elite XT table top machine, recommended by Ashgate was selected. ‘It has a number of advantages,’ said Rebecca. ‘First, it met our budget so that we were able to buy a new machine. It is a robust piece of equipment, which is easy to use and quick to operate. This is essential because the students are using it themselves and often have tight deadlines. We like its versatility in being able to bind a variety of products including hard and soft cover books as well as tear off pads, strip and lay flat binding. Another advantage is that it can bind books up to SRA3 size, which is useful for our art students who work on larger format projects. Finally and most importantly it gives us a professional bind.’

Ashgate installed the binder and ran a half day training course. ‘It an amazing piece of equipment – so easy to use and the bind is very strong on a range of stock from very thin to 350 g/m2,’ she pointed out. Two students have also been trained to undertake perfect binding for the department.

There are no set up times or book format adjustments. It self adjusts for book thickness from one to 1000 pages. For the best quality it is also possible to move the paper stopper to one of the three predefined fastening places for A3, A4 or A5 standard. It features ‘Paper Grain Opening’ which opens the paper grain with very little noise and no paper dust. The user can control the number of ‘PGO’ passes that need to be made to ensure a strong bind.

The graphics students are the heaviest users of the Elite XT. ‘There are peaks and troughs during the year but sometimes there are queues right out the door waiting to use the machine. On average they will bind up to ten documents at a time and where it might take a whole day to bind a book by hand, they can do it in a couple of minutes, which is an impressive saving,’ Rebecca added.