If this was just an ordinary job on light weight card stock of about 9 thou; I would just comp up a form of plain old type high scoring rules and go with that.  Take the ink rollers out and run the stock through with enough impression so that the card stock folds easily.

I have often used hairline brass rule for this kind of job and scored all the scores or folds from one side.

But it all depends; for example, how thick the card stock is.  If the card stock is 12 thou or thicker, then this scoring with brass rule from one side only, will not work.  The results will be poor and there is a lot of danger that the stock will crack instead of folding like it should.

Steel Rule Dies

Also, it depends greatly how fussy one is. If you want a perfect result, then you are going to have to use proper steel scoring rule of less than type high and use a counter on the platen. Such material is readily available from the makers of steel rule dies. Tell them what you intend to do and on what press equipment and they will send the right material.

If the job or customer or the printer is super fussy, then you will need metal furniture between the scoring rules as this is the easiest way to obtain the exact measure between the scoring rules.  
It is also very important how big the sheet of yard stock  is.  Or if the run is short, say only a couple of hundred and for some reason or other, a double run is required, well then don’t sweat it.  Just run the job through twice.

So, I really do not know for sure what more to say.  On the surface of it, this seems like a very simple job to me. But if you have never done this before, it may not seem so  simple.

The post Accordion Folds appeared first on Metal Type.

Bristol Board was the generic name for card stock that ranged in weight from 180 pounds for 1000 sheets of 22 x 28 inches to pretty much double that in thickness. The thickness for 180M  was just under 10 mils or thous. of an inch.

Posting or Writing Grade

This card stock was made in two qualities. Namely posting grade for posters or ledger sheets and in writing grade for hand written ledgers and stock cards of many kinds. A great deal of record keeping was done by hand in pen and ink at that time.  A good many of the bristols were for top end recording keeping.

But I do have to mention that there were several low end poster card sheets that were specifically made for school art projects.

I really do not know how this card stock came to be named Bristol and to reiterate; each kind of bristol card stock in my part of the world had a specific name.  

There were many other grades of card stock, and each had it’s own name.  

The post Bristol Board appeared first on Metal Type.

A big part of our business used to be showcards and or posters.

 At the very first part of my apprenticeship, we printed all posters in 22 x 28 inches on plain posting bristol as compared to writing bristol. It was not all that long into my career when most customers would not pay for this large size and all the posters then reverted to half sheets of 14 x 22 inches and then much later to 12 x 18 inches.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I have never mentioned the imprinting of posters.  And this used to be a very big and busy market.

There has always been a place for travelling shows and dance bands and military bands,  (Susa played here in Sask. some many long years ago.)  And all of these shows or acts had preprinted posters leaving time, date and place blank and they would send blank posters in advance of their performance to their local agent or ticket seller to be imprinted with this information.  We had for many years a professional ticket selling company here in Regina called Gilles Agencies and they sold tickets for most people or entertainment companies who performed in Regina.

40 Line Type

These posters to be imprinted were of every size and style under the sun and hard to do because everyone wanted the largest type that would fit into the space available.  20  30  and even 40 line type was commonly used.  Also there was always a rush and payment was always iffy.   The printers here soon learned to demand payment up front or perhaps C.o.D. or both. Travelling shows were terrible at paying their debts.

For some strange reason the imprinting of these posters was very competitive and the job was always sought after.  This most likely was because there was so little work here in the west and so many printers.

We did get a few of these poster imprinting jobs, but not too many due mostly to all the perils such work entailed.

We did on many occasion print big batches of posters for more local country bands   with the time, date and place left blank and the users just filled in the information with black crayon markers. I do so clearly remember a county band here in Sask. called Smiling Johnny and His Band. Hah. Smiling nothing. This man did not smile and was very hard to get along with.

I write this mainly to let younger printers know that such work existed.  

Bad Payers

We eventually stopped doing any of the travelling show work because they would not pay and when the season was over they just all disappeared.

P.S. There was a full time largish shop here in Saskatchewan that pretty much printed only show cards and in multi colour too. The owner hand carved large and very large images (and became Canada wide famous for this ability)  of circus images on big sheets of bass plywood and sold these posters continent wide. His prices were extremely low.  His shop was in Estevan, Sask. and the name was King Show Print and his name was Andy King. He had two sons who took over the business, but it closed some time ago. I still have one or three posters from this company.

Even when I was just starting my full time work at 17 years of age, Andy King was an old man.  His sons were my Dad’s age.  I met and briefly chummed with one of the grandsons.

The post Printing Showcards or Posters appeared first on Metal Type.

Removing a flywheel, employing a wheel or gear puller is sometimes a necessity.

My comments are:  be real careful here, this can be super tricky.  Do not even attempt this unless you are really mechanically inclined and experienced.

I would advise trying most any other method of moving a press other than attempting to remove a flywheel.

Some manufacturers fitted a flywheel so tightly that it had to be heated to get it on the shaft and then used a square pin in a channel called a keyway, to ensure that the wheel did not shake or vibrate off.

And getting such a wheel off sometimes requires dry ice wrapped around the shaft, for 12 hours and then the hub of the wheel has to be heated with  two or more blow torches, to facilitate the removal.

And be really  careful to heat only the hub and heat it as fast as you can so as not to leach away the cold from the now hopefully shrunken shaft. This is the reason for using more than one blow torch for heating the hub.

And the reason for the dry ice being on the shaft for 12 hours is to be sure that the shaft is as cold as the dry ice and that there is enough  “cold sink,’’ in the shaft so as to last as long as possible, and that there not be too much cold loss in the shaft till the hub is heated enough for the wheel to be removed.

Also the square pin in the keyway, can be a bear-cat to remove. I have had to drill out several of these pins. And they all seem to be machined from the hardest steel that was ever made. This is really hard to do and can take hours and many more than one drill bit.

Carbide Drill Bit

I always use carbide drill bits for this sort of job and once had to switch to a diamond drill bit. These speciality bits are all so expensive.

I personally would prefer to remove part of a wall and remove the press, rather than try to remove the flywheel.

I have seen this kind of job proceed without any trouble at all, Just remove the square pin, if there even is one, and then manually pull the flywheel off. Nothing to  it at all. Just as easy as you please.

On the other hand, I have seen this job take two days and one journeyman machinist  and two highly qualified helpers.  And  over ten high quality drill bits to remove the square pin.

Lastly;  good luck to you. The wheel may come off easy peasy. Or you may find otherwise. Again, good luck and please do let us know how it went.

The post Removing A Flywheel appeared first on Metal Type.

One of the most interesting jobs that we ever did was to print 10 thousand wood rulers that had an angle on one edge.

Job was printed in two colours front and one colour back.  Ruler was one quarter of an inch thick by  exactly 12 inches long.  The inches were printed on the angled portion.

My Dad had brass cuts made and for the inch part he had to mount the cut on a matching angle base.   He did all of this mounting just by eyeballing it. My Dad had a keen eye and a really mechanical mind.

12X18 C & P

We ran the job on a 12 x 18  C & P with the machine in the off impression, position. My Dad took the precaution of tying the impression lever down so that the pressman would not absentmindedly engage the lever and thereby ruin the cuts.

The wood rulers were milled locally on Saskatchewan birch. The job took a long time to run off as we did not want to do the job in for example batches of 1000 or so. This would have meant changing the form too many times; so the entire 10 thousand was run off in the first colour and then proceeded to the second and third runs.

We were not able to feed at any speed at all.  Just slowly plugging  along day after day.  The job was for the Province of Sask. Forestry Department and these rulers were handed out to advertise the Forestry part of Saskatchewan.

The only really hard part of running the job was that the  form rollers had to “bump,’’ over the inclined cut that was used to print the inches part.

I was in about grade seven or so at the time and hence really too young to be entrusted to feed this job.  But I did help a lot with the fetching and carrying.

This all took place in our  shop building in the early 1950s.

The post Printing Wooden Rulers appeared first on Metal Type.

There has been some preliminary discussion about printing paper bags of late.  Questions about soft or hard packing and what kind of plates to use, and so forth.

Here is what I ended up doing after (in some cases) years of trial and error.

I used soft polymer plates; but with this kind of plate, I had to use a very  minimal roller pressure or roller contact with the form.  I found that too heavy a roller pressure caused very rapid wear on the plate.   And I had to ask the plate maker to etch out the plate as deeply as he could.

For the most part, no makeready was required on the work that I was doing.  Just put the job on the press and in this case I used Heidelberg platens, and set the  rollers to give barely a sixteenth inch touch and run the job.

Excess Glue

The biggest problem that I had running paper bags was bags stuck together from sloppy or excess glue in the bag making process and or very curly bags at the feed edge.  Most of these bags that I printed would have been much easier to run on a hand feed press but at this  time in my career, I no longer had a hand fed press.

I also printed some grain bags that were made of very heavy kraft paper and double thickness with tar or bitumen between the layers of kraft to discourage mice and or rats from chewing through the bag to eat the grain contents.   There was also a very clumsy fold over feature that allowed the user to seal the bag  for shipping or mailing.

The overall difference in thickness of these grain bags was about 60 thousands and still no makeready was required.  And in fact I ran these grain bags without packing except for a single tympan sheet to protect the steel platen from getting dirty with  tar leaking from between the sheets of kraft.

I do not know  if the grain and farm people still use such a bag.  I have not seen any now for years; but we sure ran lots of these on our Heidelberg presses.

The bags were so thick that I had to set the elevating mechanism on our presses to maximum to be able to run the job.  I could only put about 50 such bags in the feeder at a time.

The post Printing Paper Bags appeared first on Metal Type.

I cut both steel rule and brass rule on my Rouse cutter all the time. Cutting brass is easy and as far as I can tell requires no more strength of arm or machine than cutting lead.  

Whatever steel rule that I cut is always 2pt rule and I use the cutting edge nearest to the hinge of my Rouse cutter.   I have never attempted to cut any steel rule thicker than 2pt on this machine.

I do happen to have a 12 inch wide heavy duty plate shear.  This shear was made to cut zinc plates up to a full 12 inch wide.  This machine will cut six point steel rule with ease.  The drawback is that there is no precision gauge to use for length.  I have to manually measure the length that I want and mark with either a lead pencil or a coloured felt marking pen.  A bit awkward, but with care good and accurate results can be obtained.  

Tinsnips

I also have wide variety of hand held tinsnips.  These also work well on 2pt rule, but as I am now old, my hand grip was not what it once was, and so I no longer use this method.

I also have 15 amp, 16 inch in diameter steel cutting power cut off saw.  I have used this saw a lot to cut angle iron to build my many steel shelves and work tables and this machine is easy to use for that purpose.  It makes a good and largely burr free cut on steel rule; however there is no precision gauge and the clamping device is cumbersome to use, as it was made for much larger pieces of steel.  But it does work and cuts steel rule as easy as can be.

The speciality steel rule cutters as referred to by Dave Seat, work well and are easy to operate and make a good and proper cut.  I seem to remember that these cutters have a capacity of up to 4pt.    And if you can find a used one, well the price is usually rather more than a standard Rouse lead cutter.  And new, well forget that.  The price of a new cutter is only for those with deep pockets.  The last catalogue price that I saw was over 1000.00 U.S. plus shipment.

I know of one fellow who purchased a metal cutting blade (essentially a grinding wheel, but very thin)  for his wood cutting table saw and regularly cuts  bolt together steel shelving to smaller sizes.

So, do what you will.  There is no right or wrong way here.  There is/are easier and more accurate and more convenient ways, but if it works for you then well and fine.  Argueing with success is futile.  

The post Cutting Steel Rule appeared first on Metal Type.

Customers: yes, the bane of every commercial shop.  

The worse by far and away were Architects.  Just so ultra fussy and artistic and inventive.  I printed for two of them and then threw in the  towel.  There was no room for me.  They wanted to be the designer and type setter and pressman. It just did not work.  I had a shouting match with the last architect over the phone and that was that.  Nutters all of them.

The best customers that I had were managers of machine shops.  They  just phoned up and said come on over and get this order for invoices or whatever.  They would show me the form and tell me what they paid last time, and did I want the job.  And they all paid on delivery or at 30 days.  A pleasure to work for such fellows.

Wedding Invitations

Toward the end of my career, I stopped printing wedding invitations.  I just could not stand demanding women, telling me that they wanted to have their wedding perfect.  The all wanted 1000.00 of service for 100.00    Nuts to that.  I would sooner do most anything else.   Incidentally, all of my relatives put the arm on me for their wedding invitations.  One even told me that I would have had to buy them a gift anyway, so I might as well give them the invites as that gift.  

Of all of the wedding invitations for relatives and close friends that I printed and gave away;  well I have only ever seen these people at their wedding and never since.  Oh, what joy in my life.

I did have a number of high end professionals that I printed for.  All of them were easy to work for and it  was pleasurable to print on such high end paper.

These professional people were very demanding at the start, but once I was able to find out what they wanted, it was easy.  They just repeat ordered till either they or I retired.  One very high up physician, ordered a triple batch of stationery when I sent notice that I was retiring.  That was very nice.

The post Customers! appeared first on Metal Type.

At the start of my apprenticeship, we printed a lot of signs.  All kinds of signs.  For Sale, For Rent, Rooms to Rent, etc.

We sold many of these directly from our small shop office, but we also sold all manner of signs to a stationery shop that was located in downtown Regina, by the name of Hazen-Twiss Stationers.

This shop was started by two business men of this name, and ran for some years, when the partnership split up and Mr. Twiss opened a shop in Saskatoon.

Anyway, Mr. Hazen here in Regina sold a wide variety of stationery items including some signage that we printed for him. The production runs were always very small, at about 6 signs per caption. Dad always printed one or two more for us as a stocking item for our shop. We got about 10c per sign from Mr. Hazen and sold them to the public for about double that.

This went on for many years and when we finally got out of this, sign business, we had about 100 different titles. We gave away our final stock to a local church bazaar and then just scrapped whatever was left over.

50thou Cardstock

All of these signed were printed letterpress of course and on about 50thou, thick white cardstock.  

We used wood type from about 10 line to about 20 line which was the biggest we had at that time.  The largest of these signs were printed on our 12 x 18 C & P hand fed press. We used to lay these freshly printed signs all over the shop to dry overnight. We used regular job ink to avoid washing up the press after such a short run.  Took over night for the ink to dry.

As you can see the profit margin was small and the length of press run was super short. Imagine a commercial job of 6 to 8 impressions. But times were super rough and tough and we took what we could get.    

All of the above lasted from about when my Dad established our small shop in 1929 to the time when I was about in grade 9 or 10 in about the year 1953.

The post Printing Signs appeared first on Metal Type.

One fine day, my Dad got a phone call from a caretaker who worked at a down town church hall, to say that the were scrapping two large, old pool tables;  and that the slates from these pool tables were available for the taking.

So, Dad and I  jumped into our Austen station wagon and went over there to the back lane door and loaded up four large pool table stones that were of slate with the corners cut to facilitate the corner pockets of a pool table.

We then took them over to a customer of ours who manufacturerd tomb stones and he  owned a saw with a diamond blade that would cut stone.  

This man cut these slates to a nice rectangular shape, just the right size to fit on top of two brand new galley cabinets that we just bought for our shop.  

The slates were so heavy that it was all my Dad and I could do to lift them, but even so, we quickly determined that at about inch and a quarter thick these stones were too thin to be of all that much use.  So, we put them down two thicknesses on each cabinet.

We really did not know if they were perfectly flat, but they sure looked flat and we just used them.  Worked fine.  This all occurred about 1950.  I was rather young then and my Dad was in the prime of his life and printing career.

The costs involved were very small.  My Dad gave the church caretaker a mickey of rye for the stones and we had to pay the  tomb stone shop for his time in cutting these slates to shape, but we saw this as being well worth it.

Not too much more to say here.  This is just one of the many things that we did and built and jury rigged to stay in business.  Mostly things worked pretty good for all of my career.

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