Spiral Bound Books

Spiral bound of a book is defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as: having pages held together along one edge by a continuous piece of wire or plastic that passes through holes in the pages. That plastic is commonly referred to as: COIL

The continuous coil is usually made out of extruded plastic. That coil is what will be used to bind the book. The plastic coil looks really nice and reminds me of those metal springs that I used when I was a kid. You might remember those metal coils that would go down the steps...

Plastic coil for coil bound books.

The sheets of paper or plastic that are going to be bound must have holes that match the size and separation of the plastic coil.

DRILLING:There is equipment that is used to drill those holes.
SIZE OF COIL: Since there are different types of paper and the total number of pages in a spiral-bound book could be a few or many, the thickness of the spiral coil will change.
PITCH OF COIL:With that, the "length" of a turn or pitch will change as card card-body. There are a number of standard pitches that the industry adheres to.

Sizes of books that can be finished with spiral bound:

• 1 - Sizes up to 8.5" x 11" . The spiral can be applied on either side (either the long or the short side)
• 2 - Most of the documents that are spiral-bound are produced through digital printing that has a maximum printing size of 12" x 18".

The largest regular coil has a lenth of 11" so it is recommended that the coil gets applied on the 12" side but you will need to accept that the coil will be shorter than the sheet itself

Paper punching machine.

Advantages of this binding method

• 1 - Relatively inexpensive
• 2 - Allows for very short production batch needs
• 3 - The book looks very professional
• 4 - If the book had to be altered by adding or removing pages or sections, that can be done relatively easily.
• 5 - The spiral can match the color scheme of the piece. Coil is available in multiple colors.

Disavantages of this binding method

• 1 - Labor intensive and therefore can take time to produce large orders
• 2 - The colored-spiral-bound coil is available in multiple colors, but those require custom orders and often times, custom manufacturing which increases the cost of the spiral coil and extends the turnaround of the job.