For someone who is not really experienced in corporation or business world, a folding machine can sound like something that no-one really needs. Haven’t you ever though about the fact that every nice letter that you get from any business or company, are nicely folded inside the letter. If you try to do that stuff by hand you are going to miss-fold a lot of them and they will look untidy. Also think about folding 10 000 letters to your customers by hand – not likely to happen.
The thing is that for purposes like this there are always machines that can do a better job than you – this applies for every simple procedure that you can do. If it is just about counting papers or doing a simple mechanical task like folding paper tri-fold or in half then you should let a machine take care of it. This is if you are doing a lot of it – if you just send a few letters to your friends every now and then, there is no point in purchasing a machine like this as they can be quite costy. Even so there are cheap folding machines also, and you should not limit your options – if you think you need one then you should get one definitely. These machines can be quite handy.
The number one thing that I would look in a paper folding machine like this is the fold per hour rate, or the papers per hour rate. They also call this the sheets per hour. To make it simple it means the capacity of your folder, basically how fast it is at folding. If you have a large mailing list that consists ofmaybe even hundreds of thousands of people, you might want to look at investing in to a few machines that all are heavy duty folders and have a capacity of 8000 to 10 000 sheets per hour. These machines are doing the job quite quickly because if you count it down 10 000 sheets per hour is 167 sheets per minute and almost three sheets per second – imagine doing that by hand.
Besides just looking for a folding machine at these rates, you should also consider getting a machine that is also an inserter. This means that it does two jobs at once, and as you have already printed out the addresses in your letters and have envelopes which have those small windows, all you need to get is a folder that is an inserter. This means that it automatically puts the letters inside the envelopes and makes a great difference in the efficiency. Naturally this decreases the folding speed as doing two tasks at once requires more precision, but usually the decrease is not that large. Many of these machines are also pressure sealers, which means that they press on the end of the envelope to close it, before they move on to the next one. So basically one machine like this can take care of all your mailing – just have it push the letters to a box which you take to the post office.
If you are just looking for an affordable low duty paper folding machine then you must be running a small business that needs to take care of stuff like billing, invoicing and other regular stuff. If you have a membership product then you are practically sending the same bills for everyone, with just the different numbers in them, and for a smaller mailing list a low duty or a medium duty paper folder should be enough. The prices of these machines are already significantly lower than the higher duty models, but they are also quite a lot slower. The benefits of these machines usually are that they are smaller, and if you have a small office then you can get a desktop folding machine that you don’t need to have too much space for. The low duty usually means that it can fold anywhere from 1000 to a few thousands sheets per hour. These machines aren’t usually as versatile as the more expensive models and you can normally get only a half fold, and not the tri-fold option. Even so that is something that you don’t usually need with regular invoicing,
When you are looking for that folder of yours, you need to make a few things clear before you move on. There are two types – in general – of folding machines, and these are friction fed paper folders and air feed folding machines. Both of these work great but not for all kinds of papers. It all depends on what do you need it for actually. If you have paper that is glossy and coated with plastic layer then you are most likely going to need an air fed machine. This is because the surface of the paper is slippery, and that is going to make the friction fed machines have paper jam every now and then – if you have a large mailing list then this is not practical. You want to be able to leave the machine out there doign the job, without watching at it all time. It needs to be reliable enough to leave running through the night while you are sleeping so that you can mail all those letters in the morning. Right? So for slippery or glossy paper you should always go with an air fed machine just to keep it simple and trouble free.
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