If you work in a print production business or reprographic department imagine this scenario: your client has brought you a project for duplication wanting you to bind 100 books with silver double loop wires. You produce all the pages, punch them and begin binding them in your wire closer. After a few books in you notice there are oil marks staining the sheets! You know it wasn’t your punch, all the pages came out clean. You’ve never seen this oil marking when binding with other colored wires. Well, it just might be the silver wires that are causing that.
You heard me right, the binding wires. During the wire forming process most wires have a colored vinyl coating that provides some insulation when it moves through the forming machines. But silver wires have no coating, they are just bare metal and to aid in the forming process, a light oil lubricant is applied. This oil can sometimes be more prevalent on some batch runs and may end up transferring book to book when stacking or just from being in the punched holes. Now this is not a frequent issue, in fact I’ve only heard of it happening twice in my 15 years at CFS. Still, I would not want to take the risk of ruining all of my booklet pages that I’ve printed. So what is the option when your client insists on silver wires? Should you take the risk ordering silver and then test the wires and perhaps spend hours blotting or wiping them down?
This is where pewter wire comes to the rescue! It has the vinyl coating so it requires no oil to move through the wire formers. As far as the color goes, I feel it looks a little richer, a little more sophisticated, refined and smoother than the bare wire (that’s my graphic design training coming through). You can see the two colors side-by-side in the picture above (click for a larger view). So if your next wire binding book requires silver colored wire, consider the pewter colored wires. We can even send you some free samples if you need to test them or run the color by your customer.
Have you ever experienced this situation with silver wires? Ever had to talk your client out of a binding element color choice? Share your experience in the comments below.
