Part of Metal Type’s Printing Advice section, Phil describes a very unusual print job.<\/p>\n
One of the most interesting jobs\u00a0that we ever did was to print 10 thousand wood rulers that had an angle on one edge.<\/p>\n
Job was printed in two colours front\u00a0and one colour back. \u00a0Ruler was one quarter of an inch thick by \u00a0exactly 12 inches long. \u00a0The inches were printed on the angled portion.<\/p>\n
My Dad had brass cuts made and for the inch part he had to mount the cut on a matching angle base. \u00a0 He did all of this mounting just by eyeballing it. My Dad had a\u00a0keen eye and a really mechanical mind.<\/p>\n
We ran the job on a 12 x 18 \u00a0C & 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.<\/p>\n
The wood rulers were milled locally on\u00a0Saskatchewan 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\u00a0changing the form too many times; so\u00a0the entire 10 thousand was run off in the first colour and then proceeded to the second and\u00a0third runs.<\/p>\n
We were not able to feed at any speed at all. \u00a0Just slowly plugging \u00a0along day after day. \u00a0The job was for the Province of Sask. Forestry Department and these rulers were handed out to advertise the Forestry part of Saskatchewan.<\/p>\n
The only really hard part of\u00a0running the job was that the \u00a0form rollers had to\u00a0“bump,\u2019\u2019\u00a0over the inclined cut that was used to print the inches part.<\/p>\n
I was in\u00a0about grade seven or so at the time and hence really too young to be\u00a0entrusted\u00a0to feed this job. \u00a0But I did help a lot with the fetching\u00a0and carrying.<\/p>\n
This all took place in our\u00a0 shop building in the early 1950s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"