Meet the Machines

Hello, this is Jon D. again. Today I want to describe to you the printers we use to produce the teacher's manuals, student sheets, and some other pieces of the My Father's World Curriculum.

We have three production printing machines. Two are color machines, and one is a black and white printer. The black and white machine is made by Canon and is called the Titan. When we originally bought the Titan it was a Vario 6220, but now it is a 6330. The reason for the name difference is that you can buy a speed license to run this machine at different speeds. At My Father's World we actually have the fastest black and white printer out there. It can produce 330 impressions a minute, which means it prints approximately 160 sheets of paper, printing both sides at one time. This is very fast and it does an excellent job as far as quality. We have an attachment on the end of this machine that is a booklet maker. We can make a saddle stitch booklet like our Language Lessons booklet. We can make booklets up to 160 pages folded, stapled, and with a nice, square back.

The next machine we use is the C8000 and it can print 80 impressions a minute. It is a very high-quality commercial color machine that is sometimes called a digital press. We primarily use the C8000 to print the covers for a lot of the products that we produce. This machine attaches the image to the sheet of paper electrostatically by putting toner on the page to make the image. The paper then runs through a fusing unit which uses a very high temperature to melt the powder toner onto the sheet of paper. The Titan also uses this method. When we print on a glossy stock, the image comes out very shiny and is a very high-quality image. The C8000 is an older machine and we will be replacing it very soon.

The third machine we have is the Kyacera 15,000. We lovingly call it Shamu because of the color of the machine. This is a commercial grade ink-based printer and we print many things on this machine, like the language lessons, Kitchen Chemistry, all of the student sheets, and almost everything that is not a cover that has color in it. It also prints 160 sheets a minute, but it can only print one side of the sheet at a time, so it technically is not as fast as the Titan. Still, at 160 sheets a minute, it's very fast - faster than most printers. This printer uses ink to print the image using very tiny ink jet nozzles that spray the image onto the sheet. It has a lot less ink waste than the toner-based printers have toner waste. The quality on Shamu is also high, but it doesn't quite reach the same level as the Titan, and, since it is an ink jet printer, it cannot print on glossy sheets of paper, because it would take too long for the ink to dry before you could put the next sheet on top of it. If the pages stacked before the ink was 100% dry, the pages would stick together from the wetink.

All three of these are very high-quality printers and I enjoy printing on them very much. Shamu actually does an excellent job of stacking the paper so it comes out in very neat stacks when it is done printing things like the student sheets and the language lessons. It can offset each set of student sheets so that it's easy to separate and shrink wrap the student sheets or to take the language lessons over to that booklet maker that I mentioned earlier and manually feed it through that machine. I will go into more detail of the other pieces of equipment that we use to produce the curriculum in my next article. Thank you and I hope you have a blessedday.