What do you need to know about stitching? part two

Sewing with wire or paper clips (staples)

In printing, there are several most common types of fastening sheets and notebooks of a book block. Each of them has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages and is suitable for certain types of printed products.

Thread sewing is considered the most durable, reliable and prestigious. It is used in the production of books and, occasionally, prestigious magazines. It firmly holds both thin and thick sheets together and limits the opening of the book block.

There is also a type of fastening known as sewing with thermal threads. It differs from the first method only in that the threads are not tied, but soldered. Despite the efforts of manufacturers, the method did not find appropriate application, although it was supposed to be a replacement for wire sewing, significantly easier and cheaper to fasten a wide variety of types of papers.

The metal spiral, as a type of fastening, ensures very good opening of the book block ( 360˚) without damaging the cover or sheets. Most often used in the production of calendars, notebooks, notepads, reference books, and catalogs. They are used both on a production and office scale.

But most often, plastic spirals are used to fasten office papers. This method does not require complex equipment, and the binding itself is done manually using a simple and inexpensive machine.

For publications complete with a selection, sewing with wire or stitched staples is used. This type of fastening is quite common in small- and medium-scale production, it is quite simple and economical. The disadvantage is the deterioration of the openability of publications, so this type of binding is rarely used. However, it provides very high bonding strength, and in combination with gluing the cover on a hot-melt adhesive machine, the result is a good appearance of the product. Therefore, this method can be recommended for publications designed for intensive use: school textbooks, reference books, methodological manuals.

For sewing thick brochures, it is recommended to use counter stitching. In this case, the brochure is stitched with two staples towards each other, and they do not extend to the other side of the block. A necessary condition for ensuring the strength of such a connection is the mutual overlap of the staples to a depth of at least two-thirds of the total thickness of the brochure.

For fastening with wire, wire stitching and staple stitching machines are used. The former are more economical to operate due to cheaper consumables (wire in reels). The latter use ready-made staples, due to which they have a simpler design and are much cheaper. At the same time, automatic staple sewing machines provide a greater variety of types of fastening due to the use of staples of various shapes and sizes.

At the Wolf Printing House, selection, stitching, bending and cutting of products are carried out in line on Horison and Duplo equipment. This ensures a fast and high-quality process for producing multi-page publications using the staple fastening method.