Question about sheet orientation.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by con40

The gold boxes would have been applied in a separate process than the ink printing and the UV coating, so it's not likely that they had a whole lot to do with the orientation of the cards on the sheet.

One reason may have been for collation. The cards are cut down and sorted via machine and this orientation may have facilitated more efficient automated packing of the cards.

Another reason could be for optimum print quality. The goal on any print sheet is to balance the spread of ink over the sheet as much as can be controlled. If you print too much of the same ink color in one area, you can get unexpected print anomalies like ghosting (when sudden shifts from full flod of ink to complete absence of it in a short space makes a ghost impression on the sheet when transferring from the blanket). The spot gold ink would have been very susceptible to ghosting because of the start stop nature of printing solid borders.

Great explanation of the print quality issue. I'd been trying to figure out how to explain that.

I'm not as sure about the foiling. I've seen a hot stamp foiler in operation, but only a small one. The foil is on a backing and is pressed on with a heated die from behind the backing. It looks like there's enough room for them to fit another set of foiling between the bit that's there. So the roll of foil would only have to move a few inches at a time.

Maybe they got the best of both operations, efficient foiling, and good print quality. So unlike the Topps of the 70's.

Steve B