Hard packing vs. soft packing

[tmiller_iluvprinting]

Are there any advantages to one method over the other?

[Kaoticor]

Soft packing can help with smash resistance for your blanket.
Hard packing can provide good quality solids.

I'm sure others have their own views on these, so not saying this is true for everyone, just what we have personally seen here at our plants through our many blanket and packing tests. We have very high quality standards we have to meet and for us a harder packing works better, as the soft packing seems to print "patchy" solids.

K

[Alois Senefelder]

Hello fellow Lithographers,

Blanket Packings

These days, with the dominance of compressible blankets the choice of blanket packing

composition ---- should be HARD

The blanket face together with the compressible layer and cotton carcase are the dominant

properties of the blanket ink transfer onto paper.


Regards, Alois

[GazKL440]

We run under blankets on both our 40" and 26" Komori's and I reckon we get a fair amount of dot gain as a result. I haven't got the tools at work to measure the gain, but I've noticed that on higher quality jobs that half tones are hard to get spot on often requiring what I'd consider a fairly low density to match proofs. However, if you're running an image that requires a good solid with a reversed out picture or solids/screens in line from grip to tail a fair amount of compromise is necessary: ie, either the solid or the picture is never *quite* perfect.

Irritating to say the least, and unnecessarily time consuming....

A quick comparison between a printed screen and an unused plate (same image) shows pretty high gain, I'd ballpark it at 10/15% but again this is just guesswork given the lack of proper tools to actually measure it, but my denso tells me it's not overloaded with ink.

I also think that the ink we run is a contributing factor. For reasons that neither the rep nor my boss will disclose, we run Hostmann Steinberg "Perfexion" on a non-perfecting press, seems a little light to me and plenty is required for proper density.

I guess the benefits of a soft under packing outweigh the cons in our case however, as we generally run campaign work that involves huge run numbers and you get away with minor bingles as the softer blanket/packing combo seems pretty resilient. For example the run we are currently printing has got to be 500k+ impressions.... Plenty of bloody ink too lol using roughly 2kgs/deck/stack..... sigh....

[REYES1377]

I have always been a fan of the least amount of sheets to get you to print correctly.

[Cornishpastythighs]

I think this is a case of whatever works best for your application, much like fountain solution, ink,plates,rollers and pretty much everything to do with printing

[turbotom1052]

i prefer to pack blankets hard unless im chasing a gear streak issue