What is scrap and what isn't?

[steve B]

Originally Posted by MuddyMules

Thanks Steve and back atcha. Your input is fantastic.

I never had the honor of dipping my hands in ink, since I worked in the prepress department. I still had to go out on the press to look at issues with the plates and to help with verifying the color to the proof.

Now.....when I first started out as a rookie, I did have to chase down a "bucket of half-tone dots" because the pressman told me they needed more half-tones for the press. They also had me look for a "plate stretcher" because they couldn't get the colors in register on the make-ready sheets and that they needed to stretch the plate to get it in register. All in fun........I miss that family.

You mentioned that the make-ready sheets would not go to the cutters....what our guys would do is put the make-ready sheets on top of the paper load, after final printing, to keep dust, dirt, drinks, food, people's asses from sitting on the loads, etc... off of the good sheets to help eliminate any additional waste. Sometimes they would write across the sheets to let everyone know what was under the make-ready sheet as well. The make-ready sheets would go through the plant on top of the paper load all the way to the finish before it ended up in the scrap bin. Sometimes they would simply get mixed in to the good sheets after they came off of the press or when the straight cutter would jog the paper into the cutter. You pick up the first few sheets and sit them in the cutter, with the make-ready sheet still on top, turn your back to talk to some yapping co-worker complaining about his life, turn back around and pick up another few sheets, put them on top of the other sheets and there you have it, a make-ready sheet mixed in to all of the good sheets, cut, boxed and out the door with no one ever knowing.

Also, I just want to go back to a printers mindset. If a printer were to take something home, I guarantee that they would take the "perfect" printing over a mistake every time. They would be proud to show their family what they produced. Printers are very picky and passionate about the product they produce. Most of our guys or gals took a lot of pride in their work. They were journeymen and they wanted the work to be perfect. It was a competition between them to show who could produce a nicer product at a faster rate with minimal waste. Hand cuts would not have come from the printers that I knew and worked with. Off center or miscuts were common and were not avoidable all of the time, especially on the deeper sheets in the cutter, but they hated them. Once cut, it's too late, they're not printing them again. A good pressman would not like producing out of register cards, hickeys, missing colors, flopped backs, etc....they did love a misspelled name or word, because that came from my department and they would love to rub it in that we were idiots.

Every department had scrap factored in to the production of the final product. I cannot remember the percentage allowed for scrap, but it was minimal. You were paid good money to produce a product and it better by right and up and running quick. The faster it shipped, the faster the invoice went out.

Oh and by the way, the customer wanted everything perfect from the printer. No mistakes. Would you pay an invoice for a box of crap? Yes, "crap" is what it was before it was collected, not scrap.

Sounds like the same sort of shop just a bit bigger. Ours had around 20 people. I did a total of four days in prepress. One each in camera and platemaking during a couple huge rush jobs. And two days in the stripping dept (Opening for off color jokes in case any of you missed it) That was because of a camera operator who hit his "lunch" a bit too hard and got an entire afternoons worth of negatives all spotted from airborne dust. It was apparently cheaper to give me a light table spot and a bottle of the red whiteout like stuff than it was to reshoot the whole thing. Followed by my second day in the camera room which I don't count since it was all cleaning - Not bad, a cool job for a couple days and only one crummy one to balance it out. They were good that way.

One time we did a Two color program for some awards ceremony. And I had to go through all 1500 of them to find 50 perfect ones for the winners who were all pictured. That gave me a better appreciation for just how common tiny hickeys and ink spots really were.
(For the rest of you- Hickeys are a term for fisheyes. I'm pretty sure neither is the proper technical term, but I'm now sure Hickeys was common in at least two shops. )

Those pranks sound good. The other ones in our place were tossing the general help in the waste paper bins - Big canvas ones, maybe 4 ft tall and 2 1/2 x 4 ft. And one of the press guys tried surprising me with an ink cup containing some solvent and a firecracker. It went off when he tried to light the fuse in the stairwell. Damn funny. No injuries, but he looked like the coyote in the roadrunner show and wouldn't immediately explain to me just what the __ had just happened in the stairwell.

Not too many people actually miss their early jobs, but I sure do. print shop was actually my third job, after a photolab and assisting a photographer. Both also pretty cool jobs.

And just to keep stuff close to on topic.

In stamps errors that got released are usually valuable and widely collected. But stuff that got saved/stolen from the trash is referred to as printers scrap and is only worth a minimal ammount as a curiosity. Just the opposite of what we do.

Steve B