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#1
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No. The term "gear streaks" sounds like they are random streaks on a sheet.
The Plate Scratches are a pattern that was repeated over and over on each sheet. Pat has stacks of the same player with the same exact Plate Scratch on the back.
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ThatT206Life.com |
#2
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Well, I think it's more explanatory than "plate scratch," since the printing plates were relief and not intaglio. A scratch on a relief plate would be void of ink.
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#3
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Hi Manny,
The gear streak information is interesting thanks for posting about them. I agree with Steve and Luke I don't think that's what caused the plate scratch marks. From what I understand the gear streaks wouldn't be repetitive and the plate scratches are. As Luke pointed out the same exact scratch can be found on the same subject multiple times and on some sheets they same exact scratch can be found on two different subjects. Konetchy Group.jpg Konetchy Group Front.jpg Doyle-Stone.jpg Doyle-Stone Front.jpg |
#4
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Quote:
Perhaps they're not "gear streaks" as I understood the term from the definition I found. There may be another term for the streaks in pressman nomenclature. One of these days if I have time I'll venture off to a printing forum and ask there what the streaks are called. I still think my theory is correct. If you believe the Library of Congress' classification of T206 cards as relief prints, and you also assume that the owners of American Lithographic stuck to their area of expertise and operated a multi-color offset press, then the only valid explanation is that the scratch was on the rubber blanket roller and not the printing plate. The Occam's razor explanation is that some kind of machine feed malfunction caused the rubber roller to bounce up suddenly, grazing the surface of the relief plate at a high speed, thus causing a scratch on the surface of roller which would hold ink and transfer to the card in the same spot each time. Either that, or simply that the roller became worn and scratched with use. Because of the constant spinning of the roller, the scratches took the form of a helix wrapping around the cylinder, which translated into diagonal lines on the paper. The steepness of the scratch I guess depended on the speed of the press when the scratch occurred. Last edited by SetBuilder; 06-25-2018 at 08:38 PM. |
#5
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A few comments on a couple points.
T206s are lithographed for sure. Other types of printing come across a lot differently. There are two main sorts of lithography, direct and offset. Both use either a specially prepared block of limestone, or a plate that can retain water. Commercially, the plates have been mostly metal for around a century. But a "lithograph" plate can be paper. In fact you can make a lithograph at home using some porous paper, a crayon, a brayer and some oil based ink. (Getting it to come out any good isn't all that easy) T206s were not done with a modern CMYK process. The typically quoted thing is six colors, but it's usually more like 8, possibly more. Recess printing is essentially like Intaglio, and the result is much different than lithography. Feel a new banknote, you'll be able to feel the raised in since it mostly sits on top of the paper. The multi color press shown doesn't appear to be an offset lithography press, as the inked rollers are shown printing directly to the paper. The stones were heavy, and had to be laid out by hand from transfers. Making them and resurfacing them was a specialty, and making a stone cylinder with the proper surface would be harder and more expensive. I've never heard of a press that printed from a stone cylinder. Here's a small shop from around 1917. The big press on the left is a flatbed lithographic press, the small ones center and right are letter press presses. ALC was a huge company, and owned a wide range of presses. They were also pretty tight with RS Hoe company that made presses. (Not that a place like ALC wouldn't be on great terms with a few press makers. ) Hoe had web fed typographic presses - a totally different process- in the 1800s that were used to print newspapers. They also had web fed presses, but none of their literature that I've found mentions web feed combined with lithography. They also in around 1910 sued a couple guys who had sold them on a photographic way of making lithographic plates, which apparently turned out to be a scam as the process didn't work and never would. And was also "sold" to other companies as far away as England. So photographically transferred halftones were very cutting edge at the time. A book about printing processes from 1917 mentions metal plates, but still has them being laid out by hand from transfers, so photographic reproduction wasn't being done on a large scale. |
#6
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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. Here, read through this blog and all the sections. I think you will enjoy it. Last edited by SetBuilder; 06-27-2018 at 06:40 AM. |
#7
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here's one that using the plate scratches makes it at the least 240 cards. https://imageevent.com/patrickr/upda...=Sheet%203.jpg |
#8
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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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