Topics for discussion re: t206 Printing and errors

[steve B]

Here's a fairly bad picture of a stone setup for production on an offset press.
http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedi...nting-87749138


And a current auction for a stone setup for proofing, or possibly a short run where the image was printed directly from the stone. Reversed image printing directly, normal image printing by offset. Modern presses don't usually print directly, but I think many of the old ones could.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Lith...item35bb4835dc

Original art is always saved since that's where you begin to print anything.

The picture taken through the screen and filter is the original halftone, and that's where the dot pattern comes from. Just like a photo negative if I have that and a print shop I can make an exact duplicate. We saved them for years in case a customer wanted to rerun something. (uncommon for us, but very common for many things. )

With the setup I'm familiar with the halftones are taped to an opaque plastic sheet the size of the plate. (On 81 fleer you can see the tape overlapping many of the pictures.) That made a negative that was used to make the plate. So it was possible to make a plate identical to one that wore out or became damaged.

The first link in an earlier post has a couple pictures of people working on large negatives at a light table, One showing two women is probably from the 50's or 60's. Things hadn't changed much, since the 30's, and were still the same in the late 70's.

I haven't found much info about the transfers, I may have to get going on a visit to the printing museum that's somewhat local.

Steve B