B6 Ring Organisers

Recently I wrote about ISO B6 size and its potential use for ring bound organisers.

A quick refresher, B6 size paper measures 176mm x 125mm,  5 mm taller than Personal size, but 30 mm wider. So if you like the extra width of say A6, but you like the height of Personal size, then B6 might be the size for you.

A relatively new invention is 'Personal Wide' this is not an ISO size, but it is close to B6, just slightly narrower. However, the makers of these organisers might be persuaded in to making them true B6 size (an additional 5 mm width)

Last time I had been in search of a B6 ring-bound organiser, they are fairly thin on the ground. I had suggested a Custom Van der Spek and use the option of widening the basic design by 30mm. This would give you lots of options to customise the design to exactly your needs.

Gillio have a B6 six ring binder, but it is tucked away in amongst their Address Books on their website!

I believe the rings are 20mm size, but I've not had confirmation of that fact.

I'm awaiting confirmation of the size of the inserts that are fitted to this address book, they say 17.4 cm by 11.5 on the web page.

However, the tabs look quite big so the address book might be big enough to take B6 size pages.

In discussion about the previous post on one of the Facebook Groups, Jeff Damerham had spotted a Veesun B6 journal on Amazon UK, not real leather, but very cheap, so thank you Jeff for sharing a link to this one. I placed an order on Amazon France and it arrived within a few days.

It is not exactly a luxury item! It is PU leather and it has a very strange 'leather' loop closure.

However, it comes with a simple set of 15mm rings and a reasonable number of sheets of B6 kraft paper (approximately 70 sheets), not top quality, but it is ok to act as a test bed for different format inserts to try out.

As you will see from the Amazon page there are four different designs available. I went for the clock/penny farthing design!

It comes in a simple cardboard box packaged in the usual Amazon book shipping sleeve.

Here it is! It is a tri-fold design. There are no pockets or pen loops, just the cover with the rings riveted to the spine.

Measuring the pages they are precisely B6 in size (125 x 176mm) and punched in the usual Personal Filofax spacing too.

I took some of our existing insert files and decided to try them out in B6 size, scaling them to fit B6 (59% from A4 size)

Here are some normal Filofax Personal pages inserted on to the rings. Personal size is 95mm x 171mm as you can clearly see the size difference.

The photo below is a normal A5 insert the Enhanced Time Manager 4 lines per day version. Scaled to fit B6 when printing. No changes to the file at all. The line height might be a little tight for some people.  

I then took the equivalent Personal size file and modified it to fit the wider paper. To get the print out shown below. With only three lines per day, it improves the line height issue seen in the above A5 derived version.

I then tried out the A6 version. Again like the A5 version, no changes were required to the file itself. Just scale to fit B6 on printing it. This is very similar to the personal version in layout, but because no changes to the file are required it is much easier to use.

So from the above experiments, I would recommend using the A6 versions of our diary inserts if you are printing them on B6 size paper.

I will shortly do a post on creating and printing B6 inserts for those of you investigating this size. I think it holds a lot of promise in terms of a page size.

I also discovered one from Bettino a company from Vietnam. But ordering this might be a little complicated, unless you are a native speaker.

Here is a link to the Amazon UK one shown above.