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Originally Posted by emmygirl
Ok, so I spent more than half my working life in a print shop. Here's how the process works to get the little beauties cut with the best results possible for the timeframe of 1909-1911 etc. First the cards are sent to the cutter with an "operators Side Guide Mark' This mark tells the cutter operator how to put the stock into the cutting machine to insure that the "Registration of the printing press is perserved while cutting takes place. Stock is then trimmed four sides, first the operator guage and "Gripper" bottom of sheet goes into the cutter and the "OPPOSITE SIDE is trimmed and you now have (3) three sides in hopefully good registration in TACK. Next the sheets are moved to the other side of cutter known as the cutters BACK Guage. The sheets are not JOGGED here because they are still together from the previous cut. Cut number two cuts the back of the sheet that is probably the most uneven. You now have a clean 4 sided stack ready to cut into stips. The stock is returned to the original position on the cutter with the gripper edge of sheets and operator side guide at square one. Cards are now carefully cut into strips of as many rows as the sheet has let's say 10 rows of 7 cards per strip. After all rows are cut the first strip goes back into the cutter and each additioal strip is carefully "PUSHED/SLID" next to the one before it making it ready to be cut 10 rows at a time. Here is where the need for a really sharp cutting blade is escential. The rows are clamped down with a wieghted bar just before the blade does its work. A dull blade causes "PAPER DRAG" and that causes miscuts. So, sharp blade and knowledge of side guides and great cutting skills will make for more even borders and beautiful T206's etc. Hope this helps and sorry this is so lengthly. Jim
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The shop I worked for did it slightly differently. The stack was always placed up against both the side and the back guage to ensure a cut that was square. Most of what we did was large, stuff to fold into books, small placards and posters, that sort of thing. The few times we had small things like business cards or deposit slips. (Hardly ever, maybe two business card jobs which were done on a small press - sheets of 4 or 6, and one batch of deposit tickets I think 200,000+ multi sheet carbonless forms- That I had to shrink wrap in bundles of 50
Not fun! ) The deposit tickets were trimmed then cut into blocks, avoiding problems from handling long strips. Our cutters had a bit of memory, so you could make a repeatable series of cuts. Most small jobs were done manually, and the deposit tickets were done oddly, the whole job got the first cut, then the whole job got the second cut and so on.
Either method can be fine, depending on the equipment and job size. T206s were probably at least partly done in strips leading to a lot of diamond cuts from being a bit crooked in the cutter.
The cutters we had could handle about a 5-6 inch thick stack of paper. There were and are larger cutters. ALC being large would probably have had a couple cutters with more capacity. The adjustability would have been essentially the same as what we had in 1980 just without the memory. (which I believe was mechanically done rather than by computer.)
Steve B