Paper Drills

Choosing the Right Paper Drills

We work alongside one of the leading manufacturers of Paper Drilling and Paper Handling Equipment including Uchida, SPC and NAGEL.

Paper drilling is a method to drill holes through paper, card and other materials such as tags or sample swatches.  For this purpose, hollow paper drill bits are clamped into a driven spindle which drills in to the paper. Paper drill bits are available, from The Finishing Point Ltd (TFP), for different hole sizes and in different coating qualities.  Unlike hole punching, where only one or a few sheets may be processed, a large number of sheets can be processed with a paper drilling machine.

Depending on the type of paper drill either the paper drill bits are lowered in to the pile, either driven or by pulling a handle, or the table is pneumatically lifted to the heads and the pile is drilled. The latter method is known as Powerstroke.

Paper drilling machines can be equipped with a different number of spindles which are each built in to one paper drill head. The range starts with one and two spindle paper drills for small volumes and office purposes and reaches up to paper drilling platforms with more than 20 spindles / paper drill heads. The Finishing Point Ltd offer 1,2 and 4 head machines.

Some casinos use Paper Drilling Machines to deface used decks of playing cards, a process known as cancelling.  Cards are cancelled so they cannot be marked by cheaters outside of the casino and surreptitiously brought back in to play.

The Perfect Paper Drill and How to Decipher the Differences

Paper drilling although a simple task is used in such a wide variety of processes the different options can be confusing. In order to choose the correct and best paper drill option for your requirements you can follow a few simple steps.

What products are you drilling? For instance, if you are simply drilling one hole into paper tags then a basic single head paper drill will suffice, however, if you are drilling 4 holes in to reams of paper to be loaded in to a lever arch file then using a single drill head will make the job laborious. This is the main consideration when purchasing a paper drill, how many holes do I need to drill in each product and what quantity of that product do I need to produce in a given day or week.

If you are producing twin holes, such as for a 2d ring binder application then clearly a single head drill would be completing twice the workload of a double head drill. Depending on your volumes a single head may be viable but for speed and ease on twin hole applications, it is always best to opt for a twin head drill such as the Uchida VS200 twin spindle paper drill. The same equation applies to 4 hole drilling for applications using a 4D ring binder, a 2 hole drill will complete the task for you both quickly and accurately but if your volumes are high a 4 spindle paper drill makes the task quicker.

The decision is simply made on the application requirements and volumes of that application as all types of drills will produce single, double or quadruple holes into a ream of paper.