Teds done way more than I have. I just got a good overview in a place that cross trained and actually made us do work in different departments. Plus a few years of repair work on machinery including presses, and studying industrial history a bit.
Different shops do things slightly differently, usually depending on exactly what market they were in. We did a lot of higher quality work for colleges and the government. A couple guys had worked for other shops and those other places were each very different. One was huge and busy with large volume lower quality, the other was a tiny shop that did lots of flyers and business cards. Both had shortcuts to either make things faster or cheaper.
We didn't do the chromalin proofs like Ted did. Most customers sent in their own art, so the few "proofs" were one color sort of photographic things. (That's how few there were, I only saw maybe five in two+ years and they never told me what they were called.) Usually handmade into books to verify the page layouts worked properly.
One of the challenges for me has been translating from modern printing which as Ted says is nearly all CMYK for images. The place I worked ran custom colors for stuff like borders or stripes, but straight CMYK for color pictures. Those borders could be CMYK as well, but for small runs I think it was cheaper to mix than do color separation which was fairly expensive in 79-81.
Topps didn't even do it for borders back then and their press runs were huge.
They also never sent the makeready sheets to cutting.
We also had very few makeready sheets. The first job I ran the press for was in register after 7-8 sheets. The last one I did was in register after 3. All the makeready sheets I did except one would have probably been acceptable at Topps at the time.
The stripping and platemaking departments made even a trainee like me look good. I took some stuff home, but none of the ones I did. Just a couple things I thought were cool. Book covers with a fighter plane, and a danger sign for a laser lab. "danger! class 4 laser range do not enter without proper eye protection" I had it hung up in my room for years
The four color process was fairly new in 1909-10. So T cards are an odd mix. Some colors are halftone, some aren't. And there are 6-8 colors on most cards. The colors aren't necessarily done photographically, and I'm convinced the stones were laid out from transfers printed from master stones. Many of the commercial stones I see have multiple items on them that wouldn't be printed alongside each other. Including the one stone with a 1910 ish hockey card.
For what it's worth, T206s are very consistent as far as the paper stock goes. I measured about 50 of them and they were all within about .003 of each other.
Hey Ted - I've got to ask. Did the press guys ever pull the trick of telling you that you could tell the ink was mixed properly by holding your hand over it and feeling how warm it had become? (The obvious punchline is that they would slap your hand into the ink getting it all over , and that stuff is hard to clean off.) In our place it was almost an initiation. They never pulled it on a new guy or someone they didn't like.(There are far worse things for them) Once pranked you were "in"
It's great having Ted comment. I'm learning stuff. Especially the proper terms for stuff I know is done and why, but didn't know the technical name. Like trapping.
Steve B