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JoannI'm clueless about the paper processing industry as far as putting two layers together, but it seems to me that if this were the process there would be a whole lot more T206's with delam problems. I don't really see that as a prominent problem with this set.
Also, they would have to have processed a single strip at a time, almost. Otherwise, if they processed fronts by the sheet (which would be the logical way to make a coil of a player) a diamond cut would be almost impossible. (Although, now that I think about it, I don't see a whole lot of diamond cuts on t206's.)
If you are processing a single sheet - say 20x20 images - and you put it on the cutter crooked, the slight crookedness would probably not have a great effect across only 20 frames.
But say you had a long continuous sheet with the same player in a "column" but each column a different player across the width of a sheet - this sheet itself would be in a coil. Then you run the coil across blades spaced the width of the card and slit the coil into individual smaller coils or strips, each strip containing one player. That's the way they take a big coil of steel and make little coils of steel out of it. But it would be the only logical way to process cards into strip coils to send to a back printer. Cutting the paper first and running it through a printer a strip at a time to get the fronts would be moronic in terms of slowness and inefficiency.
So if you are taking long coils of sheets, and slitting them down to player strips and put the coil on the blade crooked, the crookedness would perpetuate and get worse along the coil until eventually the images were being cut as the pictures drifted into the next "cutting lane" so to speak. So you wouldn't have a whole lot of diamond cuts - not like running in set cut square sheets, where crookedness could be tolerated a little more.
Hmmm. I don't know. Maybe they just really dialed in their processes to make sure that it ran straight all the time. Otherwise they'd have ungodly scrap. I guess I'm assuming they didn't cut the paper first and print it in strips after slitting.
Wow. Really interesting concept though. Maybe I'm getting convinced. Because actually they could make a diamond cut if the slitter blades were straight but the cut-off knife (the one at the end that goes chop chop chop and clips individual cards from a strip) were crooked. Now THAT makes sense to me.
Substantial information for or against this theory, to me, would be that 5-card uncut horizontal strip. I think it was in the Halper (?) collection at one point. If it has ads on the back it would almost conclusively disprove this theory - someone would have had to take a piece of a master coil or sheet and truck it up to whatever place printed backs and then figure out how to run it through. If that uncut strip is blank on the back, then I think Ted might really be on to something here.
Joann