Our goal is to provide Rickard Bindery customers and industry friends with information that helps win business. If your company’s print professionals are the ones in your marketplace offering design ideas and layout expertise, you will capture your fair market share.

GraphExpo ’06 concluded last week. For those of you who stopped by our booth, thanks! If you didn’t, please call Jim Egan at 800-747-1389 or 312-243-6300 x 212 to set up an appointment at your facility.  Better yet, if you brought your team to us, we’d include a plant tour.

Several of our booth visitors asked us about wafer sealing and we must confess that this caught us by surprise. Since we think of ourselves as being a customer-friendly company, we’ve changed our topic for this month’s e-mail topic to …

Wafer and Tab Sealing

There’s more to wafer and tab sealing than meets the eye. But, first let us say a word about outsourcing. Many printers choose to outsource wafer sealing. If you’re one of these, thank you. If not, rest assured that all of us at Rickard Bindery are happy to help you with your overflow or difficult projects. 

These are the three primary reasons to outsource tabbing and wafer sealing.

1. Inline is better. Applying tabs and wafer seals inline with folding and other bindery processes reduces manpower and production time. However, please understand that tabbing tends to be a production bottleneck and unless you’re very familiar with how tabbing jobs run, it’s easy to miscalculate production time and costs.
2. Sometimes a production challenge. Tabbing equipment has been known to be finicky.
3. Keep your focus.  Outsourcing frees up resources for work in your core competency areas.

Here are some helpful production tips:

• USPS regulations: For entry into the USPS mail stream, a piece requires one seal if the open edge is at the top, and two seals if the open edge is at at the bottom. As you’d expect, one seal at the top is a more economical design choice. We have heard through the rumor mill that the USPS is considering changing this difference, so pay attention to the next rate increase, which will likely happen in spring ’07.  For more information about tabbing postal requirements, the best source is the United States Postal Services’ DMM (Domestic Mail Manual). Please click here.
  
  
• Design matters. Rickard Bindery estimators often receive requests specifying specific numbers of wafer seals and detailed instructions for their exact placement. Although we understand that it may be your customer driving these requests, they may be costing themselves time and money. For example, we receive requests to wafer seal accordion folded direct mail pieces with four seals, two at the top and two at the bottom. Two ways to reduce production costs include:
  
  
  
  1. Use three seals, not four, positioned two at the bottom and one at the top of the piece.
     
     
  2. Add an extra wrap-around panel so that one seal at the top will take care of the job.  The reduction in bindery costs will more than offset your small increase in printing and paper costs.
     
     
     
     
• Not just 1” circles.  There’s more design freedom than ordinary perforated clear one-inch circular seals.
   
  • Shapes: In addition to traditional circles, today’s wafer seal shape options include: Ovals; squares; rectangles; and, butterfly seals
  • Substrates: Wafer seals come in clear or tinted Mylar, foils or paper. For an eye-catching appearance, consider custom printed seals.
  • Sizes: Circular seals usually are 1” in diameter, but they are also available in smaller and larger sizes.  The same is true for most other shapes as well.
  • Perforations: For ease of use, Mylar seals need to be either perforated or nicked. For paper seals, perfs are optional, but perforated seals open more cleanly.
    
    
• Sealing position: Wafer seals usually are used to seal the edges of a folded piece or booklet shut, but it doesn’t have to be this way.  If your design has a short wrap-around panel design, we can flat seal your product shut.

• Common products: Wafer or tab sealing can be used for direct mail, pasted booklets, stitched booklets, promotional materials, pieces with pop-ups or glued attachments inside.

The Rickard Advantage
At Rickard Bindery, remoistenable gluing is a specialty of ours. Our versatile range of equipment allows us to handle both small- and medium-volume applications. When combined with inline folding, seam gluing and attaching capabilities, we offer a highly-efficient production workflow for a wide range of products. Give the Rickard Bindery project planning experts a call to discuss your next job involving remoistenable glue.