My name is Ben and I'm a junk wax junkie

[steve B]

The Pucketts make an interesting pair. I haven't checked mine to see if I have one.

The overall process is different from coins, in the late 80's it was closer to photography. I'll give a brief description later.
Which of course ended up being way longer than brief.....

The one without the line in front of the helmet was probably from a plate corrected on the press.

The one with the line and the gap in the border is what's interesting, because of the process. And it makes me think there's at least two other versions.

The overall process is
The original art is made, usually a pasteup with the pictures etc pasted to a piece of heavy cardboard.
That then gets photographed using a huge camera - The negatives can be maybe 16x20, maybe bigger depending on the camera. The place I worked didn't do stuff like cards, and the largest press took 35 inch wide paper. Topps printed the sheets two 132 card sheets side by side, so they may have had a larger setup.
Each bit of art gets photographed through three-four filters to make a set of images. Black, blue(cyan), Yellow, and pinkish red -magenta. Images become halftones made up of a field of dots. Some printers do solid colors this way as well, Topps didn't (Usually)

The negatives are mounted to a "mask" a sheet of opaque paper or plastic. They're simply taped on, a lot of 81 Fleer show the tape in the picture.

The easy way is to have holes for the image to be visible, as the camera picks up any dust etc in the air too. Dust shows as a white spot on the negative and will print as a dot if it's not masked out. I spent a week painting over those spots when the camera guy had a bit too much "liquid lunch" and cleaned the camera room just before imaging an entire booklet. Picture sitting at a light table with a bottle of red whiteout -8 hours a day for 5 days. The whole department was involved and I got added since they needed more help. (The shop really was into cross training, the only thing they didn't let me do was run the paper cutter. )

Then four plates get exposed just like big photographs, aluminum with a coating similar to limestone. Some areas get etched and filled with a substance that repels water. The rest stay porous and retain water. The ink is greasy, so it only sticks to the parts that aren't wet.

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Puckett related - If the negative gets blocked by something, a bit of debris, tape, whatever, the image won't develop. That's probably what caused the border gap. A scratch in either the negative or in the plate will also print. some thing that made a dark spot on the negative could have also made the border gap. And that seems the most likely explanation.
So the border gap could have been fixed by the press operator scratching the missing bits into the plate, or by someone making a similar repair on the mask for the black plate.

The line in front of the helmet -if it's only black could either be a scratch on the plate, OR a scratch on the mask.

If it's on the plate there should be examples with the gap but without the line.
That there's a copy with the gap repaired, but no line means the fix happened at different times for each flaw.
The scratch was probably on the plate. Maybe a deliberate mark to point out the border flaw? Maybe not.

Or alternately, the line is from some bit of debris that damaged the mask, and caused the border gap at the same time. Thumbtack? Could have scratched the mask then blocked part of the image. Later plates from the same mask might show the scratch without the gap. If so, the only way to fix the scratch would be to replace the part of the mask that's the picture. So there might be a card with different cropping or a the picture screened differently if they didn't have spare negatives.


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Back to process.
The plates are mounted to a hard cylinder, and transfer ink onto a sheet of rubber on another roller called the blanket. Cracked plates do happen, but because they're mounted to a solid steel roller as backup, they rarely happen anywhere in the image area.

Stuff can get into the press and damage the plates and/or the blanket. A damaged plate would print as a line, a damaged blanket would leave a white area. Neither of those is at all common. The only example I have is a T206 that took me a long time to figure out, as the 1910 process and presses were a bit different. (That was right around the transition from flatbed presses printing from large slabs of limestone to rotary presses printing from metal plates. )


Steve B