I wanted to use this project to learn how to do tightly registered, multi-color printing on our 1961 Vandercook Universal I proof press. All the proofs and the final booklets were printed on this press.
These presses weren't designed for such work, but the letterpress community has proven that they are capable of far more than simply making proofs. It turned out that there were three critical factors to getting good registration. |
Image courtesy of Paul Moxon via letterpresscommons.com
(our press has a few more miles on it) |
Second, I paid close attention to how the stock was placed under the grippers and against the guide fingers on the cylinder.
This didn't actually go so well at the beginning (more about this later). The pool of light illuminating the area is from an articulating LED lamp we mounted on the press feed table. It sure makes it easier to see what's going on. |
Finally, I cut all the plates using the same art and the same settings on the laser.
This was a little confusing because it meant a huge number of layers to manage in a single Illustrator file, but with enough focus I managed to keep it all straight. |
I made a wood base for the plates to bring them to type high. I milled some scraps hardwood flooring to thickness and used double-sided tape to attach the plates.
The tape seemed a little sketchy at first, but it held up fine. There is enough variation in the thickness of cast acrylic sheet that I had to check the height to paper of each plate and adjust the makeready as required. |
All of the inks I used were from Southern Ink. Note that I switched out the gold ink shown here for their silver ink (PMS 877). I just couldn't get the gold to print well.
Southern's oil-based inks are pretty well-behaved on the press, with a reasonable open time. They also coated and released from the acrylic plates without any fuss. Buying ink in tubes is very convenient for a small quantity user like me. Even though the tubes are quite a bit more expensive per oz. than larger containers, the convenience is worth it. Besides, the cost of ink is usually trivial for any letterpress project. Certainly it is compared to the cost of the paper. |
The actual printing uneventful, except that I didn't really get the hang of feeding the stock to the press until after the blue run was complete.
Given that the blue plate contained the registration mark frame, this made it difficult to judge the registration on subsequent runs. It also meant that the blue registration varied more than enough to see. This variation is probably the most disappointing part of the entire project. Throughout the press run I printed a lot of plain-paper proofs to use while setting up subsequent press runs, perforation, and assembling the booklets.
Of course, I picked one of the better plain-paper proofs for the picture at right. (I did not, however, pick very good lighting when I took this picture.) |
Now we need some booklet covers.