Duplexing business cards
Anyone got any good suggestions about how to glue two sheets together to get two-sided business cards where both sides are printed? Something in the range of Mohawk Superfine 120#. The specific kind of project I’m thinking about is where one side of the business card is a pretty normal impression and the other side is a deep impression logo.
The two main issues I’m looking at are the
GLUE: If you use something like PVA and a small paint roller (trying to only use as much glue as is necessary) does the water in the glue dampen (soften) the paper too much so that when you apply even a fairly small amount of pressure you flatten out the impression too much.
We’ve tried spray glue (Super 77) which seemed to work ok, but I worry about its holding over a period of time.
Xyron might work but that is a lot of that stuff unless you get it on sale at a great price.
PRESSURE: Clearly you don’t want to put them in a nipping press and crank it down, but any ideas how you could apply the pressure without overdoing it? I thought about doing them 5 at a time with something like felt between them. Maybe a sheet of something with holes cut into it to protect the logo.
An element to the job in question is that it is for 5,000+ cards. Even printed 10 (Windmill) up this is a fairly serious amount of gluing no matter how well it works.
Any thoughts or experiences you can add?
Have you thought about using contact adhesive film? It is like a layer of adhesive between two carrier sheets, or in a roll it adheres more to one side than the other of a carrier sheet. It can be cut to size, adhered to one sheet of cards, peeled, and the second sheet adhered. Pressure could be applied with something like a moderately firm brayer, which should not affect the deep impression but would make the adhesion pretty firm. You will, however, have trouble with the deep impression preventing full contact on the back of that sheet, but it’s worth a try. It’s available in pretty large rolls as well as smaller ones — but I don’t know who the supplier would be — sorry! Maybe an art supply store?
Bob
How about a Potdevin glue machine, which can apply hot-melt glue; you can also it to apply liquid glue like PVA. Apply glue to back of sheet one, place sheet two on top, maybe place a slipsheet, burnish lightly, and start a stack, which you top with a board and weights. This would be simple work for a bookbinder.
For front and back to align perfectly you’ll have to consider guide edges.
There are shops out there that do gluing work will be able to duplex the stock for you prior to printing.
Do you think that the amount of impression you are desiring will make that a more complicated option then trying to glue afterwords? Part of my thought is that it would be difficult to get decent front-to-back registration by gluing together sheets that have already been printed, especially at 10-up. And especially at that quantity. I would have it pre glued, by a shop that knows how to deal with that, and then take your printing from there.
I would suggest that you simply print on heavier stock to begin with and then print the light impression image on one side and flip it to print the heavy impresssion, using a very hard packing so the image sinks in the stock, but does not show on the back. Since you don’t mention different colors of paper, there doesn’t seem (to me) to be a reason for gluing or duplexing the stock.
As usual, I might be missing some aspect of the job.
I used Super 77 on Neenah’s Classic Columns a year or so ago and it’s still holding fine. I glued, brayed and then printed, after they were dry. Worked like a charm!
Thanks for all of the comments.
After doing a couple of trial runs we are going to try the Xyron adhesive film. I got a good price on 20 rolls of the permanent adhesive on eBay. I’ll report back after we do the job which we should be printing this week.
Now to see if my estimate for how long it will takes holds up.
Did you ever go through with this? How did it go?
Just wanted to throw in a note and say that we’ve had some success screenprinting our glue for duplexing, especially in situations where a pattern was required. Recently we produced 2,000 custom sugar packets for an art opening by first printing the sheets, then printing our glue pattern, and finally duplexing the sheets as they came off the screen press. We later filled and sealed the final edge of the packaging and they’re sealed pretty tough.
James Beard
Vrooooom Press
www.vrooooom.org
We’ve done it with Xyron for business cards and tended to just let the pressure of the blade cutting out the work seal the glue. There is a lot of pressure on the paper as that blade passes through it. We’ve done it using 100# an 130#. I love how thick the cards are when you double the 130#. Really important to get the cards printed in an efficient manner to make using the Xyron as efficient as possible.