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Undocumented Printing Error?
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57 posts in this topic

8 hours ago, Kevin76 said:

It's called quality 

A blanket is a sheet of rubber wrapped around the cylinder so the image gets printed onto the sheet of paper, a cracked plate can cause the rubber to rip or put a hole in it. The missing rubber will cause a spot of missing color on the paper. 

It's possible the missing lines on the UPC was done in prepress.  No one can be a 100% certain on it since I wasn't there when it was caught.  It's either a mistake in prepress, a blanket smash or a cracked plate.  It's one of those 3.  

Thank you for your insight!   (worship)

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10 hours ago, Aman619 said:

Thanks for the explanations.  I’ve seen the soft plates you’re talking about.  As collectibles at shows...  you quoted my line about “mountains”. I think you see what I meant.  Printing is done by transferring ink to plates but only in the spots you want the ink to appear, so plates are etched by eating away areas leav8ng high points (mountains) ... only these areas receive ink.  They pass the ink to the sheets of paper... over and over again.  And are prone to small failures.

same basic process as a rubber hand stamp. If you apply the ink carefully, with just the right amount of pressure, and press it onto the carefully, you get a perfect image.  Magazine printing is the same basic principal, Only scaled up a thousandfold. 

Sounds like you're talking about a printing press from 1850.  Comics were done on web heatset presses.  20 years printing for a living, I have some slight idea how printing works.  

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6 hours ago, Kevin76 said:

Sounds like you're talking about a printing press from 1850.  Comics were done on web heatset presses.  20 years printing for a living, I have some slight idea how printing works.  

.???   No that’s not my intention... just describing the underlying science of printing in its simplest terms...to see if I’ve got it right..  and expecting you with hands on web press experience to get what I’m saying.  Same principals at work since stone lithography, etc... just mechanized to churn out 1000s of impressions at a time... 

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1 hour ago, Aman619 said:

.???   No that’s not my intention... just describing the underlying science of printing in its simplest terms...to see if I’ve got it right..  and expecting you with hands on web press experience to get what I’m saying.  Same principals at work since stone lithography, etc... just mechanized to churn out 1000s of impressions at a time... 

It's hard to get what you're saying since you aren't describing it well enough. As far as the science goes, really isn't much other than lots of electricity and engineering.   

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I reread your post.  

Ink is transferred to the rollers, then to the plate, then to the blanket and paper.  You have to maintain an ink and water balance in order to print a clean image.  Too much water and the color is washed out. If it's too little water then you have too much ink is on the image...No water will cause what happened to the current Batman 89 issue.  The water is mixed with an Etch solution, which cleans up the plate as it's running and will make only the images on the plate recieve ink and the water washes away anything outside of the image.  

This what you're looking for?  

Edited by Kevin76
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On 3/23/2020 at 8:41 AM, Kevin76 said:

No red ink  

Red+Yellow = Orange

When the red ink is too light, it'll turn orange color

If that's not it then, there's something wrong with the printing plate 

The plate was fine.  Just low ink.  Sometimes, the printer forgot to add more ink while pressing went on.

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22 hours ago, JollyComics said:

The plate was fine.  Just low ink.  Sometimes, the printer forgot to add more ink while pressing went on.

How do you know that the plate is fine?  Were you there when the press was running?  The pressman doesn't forget to add ink while it's running, you can only adjust one color at a time while it's running and the person stacking the books could be saving them when they shouldn't be.   

Edited by Kevin76
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3 hours ago, Kevin76 said:

How do you know that the plate is fine?  Were you there when the press was running?  The pressman doesn't forget to add ink while it's running, you can only adjust one color at a time while it's running and the person stacking the books could be saving them when they shouldn't be.   

I worked as the pressman for 3 three years. The ink feeder was where we put new ink.  Sometimes, the feeder had low ink that we sometimes forgot to add more ink.   There were four feeders for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. If we had printing problem (it had nothing to do with the registers), we knew the plate was out of proportion, damaged or worn-out so we asked for the new plate from the production team.  That was pretty rare.  I saw Amazing Spider-man #188 has some area that lacked of redness so I knew Magenta was either low or empty.  The foreman was supposed to check everything and told us to correct the adjustment and add more color ink to each feeder. Sometimes, the misprints or printing errors were overlooked.  The last place was binary where they used saddle staples before cutting the edges. Anyone who saw the errors would pull and destroy them.  I did for magazines and catalog books and I had seen errors many times that always were ended up in the discarded carts but few slipped by.  Any errors were found at the stores and would be returned.  Few people kept them.

Edited by JollyComics
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2 hours ago, JollyComics said:

I worked as the pressman for 3 three years. The ink feeder was where we put new ink.  Sometimes, the feeder had low ink that we sometimes forgot to add more ink.   There were four feeders for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. If we had printing problem (it had nothing to do with the registers), we knew the plate was out of proportion, damaged or worn-out so we asked for the new plate from the production team.  That was pretty rare.  I saw Amazing Spider-man #188 has some area that lacked of redness so I knew Magenta was either low or empty.  The foreman was supposed to check everything and told us to correct the adjustment and add more color ink to each feeder. Sometimes, the misprints or printing errors were overlooked.  The last place was binary where they used saddle staples before cutting the edges. Anyone who saw the errors would pull and destroy them.  I did for magazines and catalog books and I had seen errors many times that always were ended up in the discarded carts but few slipped by.  Any errors were found at the stores and would be returned.  Few people kept them.

I worked on offset heatset web presses, Goss C-700's, Goss C-500's and Harris 954's. Worked on AB presses in high school. 

I can see forgetting about running out of ink on a sheet fed press especially if the fountains are filled by hand. We had automatic ink levelers on our presses but sometimes the sensors would get dirty and the fountain would run dry. Low ink coverage doesn't always mean the ink is empty, Sometimes the books would get saved too early from a start up and the ink hasn't been brought up yet and they'd end up on the skid and out the door. We printed the Sunday flyer inserts  Home Depot, Lowes, Macy's, Aldi ect..  

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1 hour ago, Kevin76 said:

I worked on offset heatset web presses, Goss C-700's, Goss C-500's and Harris 954's. Worked on AB presses in high school. 

I can see forgetting about running out of ink on a sheet fed press especially if the fountains are filled by hand. We had automatic ink levelers on our presses but sometimes the sensors would get dirty and the fountain would run dry. Low ink coverage doesn't always mean the ink is empty, Sometimes the books would get saved too early from a start up and the ink hasn't been brought up yet and they'd end up on the skid and out the door. We printed the Sunday flyer inserts  Home Depot, Lowes, Macy's, Aldi ect..  

What years did you work with those pressing machines?   My last year was 1988 before I graduated from my college.  The technologies of the pressing machines have so much changed.  My old comany was Elkhorn Webpress in Wisconsin and is now under the different name - Central Printing.

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37 minutes ago, JollyComics said:

What years did you work with those pressing machines?   My last year was 1988 before I graduated from my college.  The technologies of the pressing machines have so much changed.  My old comany was Elkhorn Webpress in Wisconsin and is now under the different name - Central Printing.

91 to 93 in HS on the AB and then 1998 to 2019 on the other presses. From 98 to 06 I worked at Retail Printing which was bought out by World Color, which is now Quad Graphics them I moved to CT in late 2006 to work for Pro Line Printing which used to be Eastern Color, then they got bought out by R.R. Donnelley, Which they turned into LSC Communications which they then sold to Tread Printing which is what they are now...for how long? Who knows?  They've been struggling to get work in that place for awhile now, wouldn't surprise me if they shut it down soon. Glad I'm out.  

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3 hours ago, Kevin76 said:

91 to 93 in HS on the AB and then 1998 to 2019 on the other presses. From 98 to 06 I worked at Retail Printing which was bought out by World Color, which is now Quad Graphics them I moved to CT in late 2006 to work for Pro Line Printing which used to be Eastern Color, then they got bought out by R.R. Donnelley, Which they turned into LSC Communications which they then sold to Tread Printing which is what they are now...for how long? Who knows?  They've been struggling to get work in that place for awhile now, wouldn't surprise me if they shut it down soon. Glad I'm out.  

That is amazing what you went through those places had many histories.  I didn't want to work with the pressing machines for the rest of my life.  However it was very educational for us.

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23 hours ago, JollyComics said:

That is amazing what you went through those places had many histories.  I didn't want to work with the pressing machines for the rest of my life.  However it was very educational for us.

I don't blame you for not wanting to work on the press for the rest of your life, I didn't either, 12 hour shifts on nights for 20 years, sometimes doing 5 or 6 nights in a row when it's busy, digging ink under neath the press then lifting 200 pound rubber rollers that are 80 inches long, trying to put them in and out of the press on your knees. I'm glad that I'm able to apply my printing knowledge to comics though, makes grading easier and I'm able to shut down collectors when they think they know what they are looking at...Hahaha.     

I actually live about 20 minutes away from the original Eastern Color where they 1st started printing comics, It's still there, It's in Waterbury, CT windows boarded up and abandoned, but I do believe it's on the registry of historical places.  

Edited by Kevin76
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10 hours ago, Kevin76 said:

I don't blame you for not wanting to work on the press for the rest of your life, I didn't either, 12 hour shifts on nights for 20 years, sometimes doing 5 or 6 nights in a row when it's busy, digging ink under neath the press then lifting 200 pound rubber rollers that are 80 inches long, trying to put them in and out of the press on your knees. I'm glad that I'm able to apply my printing knowledge to comics though, makes grading easier and I'm able to shut down collectors when they think they know what they are looking at...Hahaha.     

I actually live about 20 minutes away from the original Eastern Color where they 1st started printing comics, It's still there, It's in Waterbury, CT windows boarded up and abandoned, but I do believe it's on the registry of historical places.  

I almost forgot about the rollers.

The most frustrating job part of all is to clean up the pressing machine everyday!

Now speaking of the rollers, most of the printers were members of local water ski show. We lost at least 2 skiers every summer because the rollers were dropped and broke their feet. I tried to tell them at the club to avoid the accidents by using the assistance. The supervisor who was the president of the club always told me to stop overreacting.

I always asked for the assistance to lift the rollers but they called me p*ssy. After 10 years of my departure, everyone must have the assistance to lift them. They didn’t think ahead of time.

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