Hey! Check This Out, Yo!
Everybody who's ever taken a course or who has read the book knows that one of the first things to do when putting a form in a chase & then putting that on the press involves moving the grippers.
For the uninitiated or those unschooled in the mysteries, the grippers are the two finger thingies on the platen of the press which usually stand off the platen when the press is open. The job of the grippers is simple: hold the paper down as the type pulls away from the printed sheet so the sheet doesn't get picked up off the platen and set to wrapping up on the rollers.
If you leave the grippers inside the frame of the form – as in: you leave the grippers too much toward whatever edge the form is going to take – the grippers will be between the type and the paper when the press closes. Thus the grippers will be where the type is going to hit the paper, but because the grippers are in the way, the type will be pressed against the metal grippers with a force of some 170 ft/lbs per square inch.
That's a nice way of saying that the type is going to get smashed into the grippers.
If the type gets smashed by the grippers, all the letters in the form making contact with the grippers will be ruined.
Type that's smashed into grippers is usually very far from type-high when the press opens. Such type might get inked but it will no longer meet the paper and if it still does, whatever it was supposed to look like will not be what it will look like.
That's a cardinal rule of letterpress: move the damn grippers to the outside of their place on the platen so you can check and set the form prior to printing.
Now there's another minor codicil to this rule, that being the mandatory removal of any extension fingers attached to the grippers under the same provision of not smashing the type.
And you'll notice that I said "removal of any extension fingers," not just moving them one way or the other so the type is out of harm's way.
Failure to remove the extension fingers might work out if the fingers are out of
the way, but if you're using the simple spring type fingers that just clip on the grippers there's always the possibility that the finger will get moved or nudged.
Imagine then that you're putting the chase in the press from the belt wheel side and your arm happens to nudge the finger off the gripper so the finger is pointed down across where the form is going to fit.
If such is what happens, you might, in a moment all too easy for a beginner, run the press closed to check the impression against the draw sheet without ever noticing that the finger is going to be dead under the type.
If such is the case, you'll have sheet that looks like the one to the upper right here.
If such is the case, you'll open the press and immediately see that you've ruined a stretch of type going from the middle of the page downward over a good inch or two of the form.
If such is the case you'll swear to yourself and then you'll sit down and look at what you've done and realize that you have only two options:
And either way, you know from experience that, unless you fix what you've fouled up, the page is going to look like the example to the right, with an open space the exact shape and size of the finger where the type (now ruined) used to be.
And that's the most cardinal rule of all: if you smash the type, it ain't gonna print.
So for me, the answer was to sit down and pick through the form, line by line and letter by letter, replacing every single piece of type on that section of the form. And when all was said and done, I still had to fiddle with the spacing so the form would lock up solidly without too much jimmying around.
And every single piece of type that I pulled from the form to fix my foul-up went straight into the hell box with the other bits and pieces of metal that have either been cut off, cut up or otherwise taken out of service.
Yeah, all that 10 pt Century Schoolbook, most of it ATF casts with some F&S Type Foundry sorts mixed in, all of it went into the hell box.
And the only consolation in that will be that some day the contents of the hell box will end up in the pot of somebody's caster and the tiny bit of foundry metal therein recycled will add to the hardness of whatever is cast from the contents.
Not much of a consolation prize, really.
The worst part of this is that over the next half hour or so after I'd squashed the type I had two more episodes of fighting with the extension finger problem. This was because, as I slipped the chase into the press from the belt wheel side again, I noticed that my left arm came down on the part of space where the extension finger was still none-too-firmly clipped to the gripper.
Twice.
Two more chances to smash type again.
Two more moments when – and before which – it became clear to me that the problem was not so much my leaving the finger on the gripper but more one of my damn arm getting in the way.
So I tried putting the chase in the press from the delivery board end and decided that my slowly aging vertebral parts were not quite up to the task of hoisting that much metal across that much space.
And thus I grabbed the finger and pulled it off the gripper and stuffed it in the drawer under the delivery board where I keep such items as extension fingers, a pencil and a small jar of Badger Balm.
This action, however late it might have been, prompted me than to grab a hank of string off a nearby shelf and use the string – tied between the grippers – to replace the metal of the extension finger.
Some time later, after all was done and the press was cleaned up and the used type returned to a galley for later distribution, it came to me that this was a good object lesson in paying attention. That and it would give me a chance to show off how good I was at messing things up.
It also gave me pause to consider how much money would have gone into what I'd done, were I running the print shop as a business or was otherwise deluded into thinking that I had a studio.
I figure I wasted a couple hours, which would be an easy $30 by today's money and a small hank of type, probably some $50 by today's money. So all-in-all, I'd messed things up good enough that, were this a money-makin' shop – I'd have been cussed at, threatened and maybe, on a bad day, fired for my lack of attention to cardinal rules.
The lesson thus learned is that I am just as fallible as the next non-pope and that, for all my carping about how things are "supposed to be done," I had no grounds for making any more of a case for what was once an art and a profession (as opposed to an art studio thing on the tail-end of a graphic arts degree) than I do for carping about all the people who have printing studios.
Wanna bet I do it again? Within a couple weeks?
For the uninitiated or those unschooled in the mysteries, the grippers are the two finger thingies on the platen of the press which usually stand off the platen when the press is open. The job of the grippers is simple: hold the paper down as the type pulls away from the printed sheet so the sheet doesn't get picked up off the platen and set to wrapping up on the rollers.
If you leave the grippers inside the frame of the form – as in: you leave the grippers too much toward whatever edge the form is going to take – the grippers will be between the type and the paper when the press closes. Thus the grippers will be where the type is going to hit the paper, but because the grippers are in the way, the type will be pressed against the metal grippers with a force of some 170 ft/lbs per square inch.
That's a nice way of saying that the type is going to get smashed into the grippers.
If the type gets smashed by the grippers, all the letters in the form making contact with the grippers will be ruined.
Type that's smashed into grippers is usually very far from type-high when the press opens. Such type might get inked but it will no longer meet the paper and if it still does, whatever it was supposed to look like will not be what it will look like.
That's a cardinal rule of letterpress: move the damn grippers to the outside of their place on the platen so you can check and set the form prior to printing.
Now there's another minor codicil to this rule, that being the mandatory removal of any extension fingers attached to the grippers under the same provision of not smashing the type.
And you'll notice that I said "removal of any extension fingers," not just moving them one way or the other so the type is out of harm's way.
Failure to remove the extension fingers might work out if the fingers are out of
the way, but if you're using the simple spring type fingers that just clip on the grippers there's always the possibility that the finger will get moved or nudged.Imagine then that you're putting the chase in the press from the belt wheel side and your arm happens to nudge the finger off the gripper so the finger is pointed down across where the form is going to fit.
If such is what happens, you might, in a moment all too easy for a beginner, run the press closed to check the impression against the draw sheet without ever noticing that the finger is going to be dead under the type.
If such is the case, you'll have sheet that looks like the one to the upper right here.
If such is the case, you'll open the press and immediately see that you've ruined a stretch of type going from the middle of the page downward over a good inch or two of the form.
If such is the case you'll swear to yourself and then you'll sit down and look at what you've done and realize that you have only two options:
1. You are going to have to sit down and set every damn one of every damn line that you've ruined . . . or
2. You're going to have to sit down and individually try to reset the last inch or so of every line on that side of the page because of what you did.
And either way, you know from experience that, unless you fix what you've fouled up, the page is going to look like the example to the right, with an open space the exact shape and size of the finger where the type (now ruined) used to be.And that's the most cardinal rule of all: if you smash the type, it ain't gonna print.
So for me, the answer was to sit down and pick through the form, line by line and letter by letter, replacing every single piece of type on that section of the form. And when all was said and done, I still had to fiddle with the spacing so the form would lock up solidly without too much jimmying around.
And every single piece of type that I pulled from the form to fix my foul-up went straight into the hell box with the other bits and pieces of metal that have either been cut off, cut up or otherwise taken out of service.
Yeah, all that 10 pt Century Schoolbook, most of it ATF casts with some F&S Type Foundry sorts mixed in, all of it went into the hell box.
And the only consolation in that will be that some day the contents of the hell box will end up in the pot of somebody's caster and the tiny bit of foundry metal therein recycled will add to the hardness of whatever is cast from the contents.
Not much of a consolation prize, really.
The worst part of this is that over the next half hour or so after I'd squashed the type I had two more episodes of fighting with the extension finger problem. This was because, as I slipped the chase into the press from the belt wheel side again, I noticed that my left arm came down on the part of space where the extension finger was still none-too-firmly clipped to the gripper.
Twice.
Two more chances to smash type again.
Two more moments when – and before which – it became clear to me that the problem was not so much my leaving the finger on the gripper but more one of my damn arm getting in the way.
So I tried putting the chase in the press from the delivery board end and decided that my slowly aging vertebral parts were not quite up to the task of hoisting that much metal across that much space.
And thus I grabbed the finger and pulled it off the gripper and stuffed it in the drawer under the delivery board where I keep such items as extension fingers, a pencil and a small jar of Badger Balm.
This action, however late it might have been, prompted me than to grab a hank of string off a nearby shelf and use the string – tied between the grippers – to replace the metal of the extension finger.
Some time later, after all was done and the press was cleaned up and the used type returned to a galley for later distribution, it came to me that this was a good object lesson in paying attention. That and it would give me a chance to show off how good I was at messing things up.
It also gave me pause to consider how much money would have gone into what I'd done, were I running the print shop as a business or was otherwise deluded into thinking that I had a studio.
I figure I wasted a couple hours, which would be an easy $30 by today's money and a small hank of type, probably some $50 by today's money. So all-in-all, I'd messed things up good enough that, were this a money-makin' shop – I'd have been cussed at, threatened and maybe, on a bad day, fired for my lack of attention to cardinal rules.
The lesson thus learned is that I am just as fallible as the next non-pope and that, for all my carping about how things are "supposed to be done," I had no grounds for making any more of a case for what was once an art and a profession (as opposed to an art studio thing on the tail-end of a graphic arts degree) than I do for carping about all the people who have printing studios.
Wanna bet I do it again? Within a couple weeks?
posted by the printer at 9:11 AM
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