Prepress Fun

Oh, that hand waxer. Ours would finally start leaking. They came with thin plastic-sheet inserts you could use to stop the leaks, but you couldn't use more than two. I finally had to resort to three.

I started out with a hand scanner about the same size. It was called Scan Man.
I also had a Scan Man (Logitech iirc) and the guide frame to go with it.
I had a desktop waxer, the one with the motorised rollers and the heated wax bath, one day I forgot to turn it off at the end of the day, next morning the shop was full of smoke and the waxing machine was under the bench, it had burned all the way through the Laminex and chipboard & fallen through.
 
I had a desktop waxer, the one with the motorised rollers and the heated wax bath
That machine was considered real "High End".
I did send out for that service when we needed higher quality with thin, even coverage of wax.
Especially for waxing Stripping Film, when we had to place many small street names on city maps etc.
 
I once had to do a doctor's billing form. That checklist with about two hundred different codes for what was done. I had to draw the lines with a Rapidograph pen, then put in the tiny listings in between the lines. We're talking waxed phototypesetting paper. I had to keep track of my time back then, and it took me 11 hours, I kid you not. And I was NOT slow.
 
When you were finished doing the paste up and got away from the board did you sometimes find a piece that stuck onto your clothing? 😵‍💫
 
Once, in the mid 70's, we received a thick bunch of pages to photograph and produce offset plates for a book.
The text was ran on Phototypesetting paper and there were a huge number of corrections, single words and lines that were typeset separately and stuck on top of the original job.
The problem was that the new corrections were underexposed, the new text that was thinner and gray, totaly different from the original text that was solid Black.
I told the customer that we can't produce usable negatives from these originals and that they either re-run and re-paste these corrections or that we shall have to shoot two differently exposed negatives, mask each and "double burn" the plates.
He refused and demanded that we go ahead "as is" and just do the best we can.
He was very annoyed to meet with a firm refusal to do his job that way.
 
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When you were finished doing the paste up and got away from the board did you sometimes find a piece that stuck onto your clothing? 😵‍💫
Oh yes. More often, though, were the tiny pieces of red tape when I was stripping negs. Any tape I cut I would stick onto the back of my hand so it wouldn't end up on the neg in the wrong place.
 
Always maintained I was 'taping' myself too seriously.
Thats two thirds of a PUN PU
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