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Old 08-04-2020, 10:49 PM
steve B steve B is offline
Steve Birmingham
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: eastern Mass.
Posts: 8,087
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bnorth View Post
It is beyond obvious one of your experts is wrong. You quoted the wrong one in your listing.

This is what a printing blanket looks like. The streaks are rain as it and me got wet when I brought it in from the garage. I took the pic in front of my bat rack that I have posted pics of several times on this forum. That means I am not trying to act cool and pretend I know what I am talking about.

There really is no way of knowing exactly what happened but it is easy to know what did not happen.

I actually think it is 100% real if that matters.
That's what that is all right.
Ours were green.

Depending on the press, there would either be one, cleaned between colors. Or one for each color.
I don't know of a multi color press that put all four colors plus glosscoat on the same blanket. No that there are none, just that there aren't any I know of for offset lithography.
(BEP has/had a press or two that could do multi color intaglio from one plate, but that's an entirely different process, and not offset in any way. As far as I know they were never all that open about how it worked.)

Those blankets are fairly thick rubber, and Ours were fabric reinforced. They were hard to damage, especially to the extent of the missing black patch on the NNOF sheet. When they got old they would crack a bit like any other rubber then it was time to replace them. That wasn't all that often.

Since they're compressible, shallow damage will affect the print quality. But it doesn't look like that.

What does look like that is debris in the platemaking process, especially since the missing area looks like packing tape.

Dry offset printing could be a couple things, one process called that uses a rubber plate similar to typesetting. Which prints to the blanket. But it's usually used for printing onto plastic or metal.

Or it could be waterless printing, where instead of a plate that retains water so it can reject ink in the unprinted areas, the plate has silicone or other ink repelling materials. It's fairly new and I don't know the exact date, but the plates are made and used in a similar way to traditional plates.
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