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Old 06-28-2018, 09:48 AM
steve B steve B is offline
Steve Birmingham
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: eastern Mass.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SetBuilder View Post
Steve,

That shop in the photo looks like an old school Kinkos store instead of a large operation.

ALC was a large sophisticated operation with rotary machines. They had to be. T206 cards alone were printed in the millions. Let's say 300 million cards were printed, at 34 cards per sheet, that's 8.8mm+ sheets. Plus all the other stuff they printed. I doubt that the press was anything other than a modern offset litho press with durable metal plates.

The technology was available at the time. My guess by looking at the T206 cards under magnification is that a half-tone screen was placed over the silhouette of the player on the printing plate. Think of it like a screen door on a frame with a stylus. The engraver would press down on the screen lightly for half-tones and press down harder for shadows. The underside of the mesh was inked, which was to be the acid resist for the relief engraving.





This was very simple technology so I'm not sure how Knapp was fooled.

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That may be how the master for a particular color was made.

The actual plates/stones were probably laid out with transfers printed from the masters. If they weren't, each position on the sheet would have a slightly different halftone. There are very few differences in the halftone areas, and the ones I've seen are usually in different series.

ALC was indeed huge, and would have had a wide variety of presses. The shop I worked at was fairly small, but did do one job while I was there that was for about 1.5 million bank deposit slips. We didn't have high speed anything, all sheetfed presses. Start to finish was under a month, and If I remember it right the job was in the pressroom for only 3-4 days. From what I've been able to find, the rate we could print at was only about 4-5x the speed of a flatbed press.
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