stories/anecdotes

[akiyama_king]

was thinking working a job the other day which was a nightmare 50K 4col near enough full coverage on 100g laser w/turn which was soul destroying... and made me think of the times yrs ago when running older unautomated presses and the trouble we'd have, and i thought ide start a thread about all your, funny, soul destroying and other stories.

i'll start with a couple -

running an older 4 col Fav, tiny reversed out text in a 3 colour rich black solid, while doing a press pass, with rep and the bosses second in command stood their. so of course struggling to get the job to stay in register, the rep shouts out for godamned sae how difficult can it be... so i turn around and slam a plate spanner into his and challenge him to do a better job, using some continental language lets say with a client stood next to us, got a written warning for that one.

Second one, a engineer had come in to repair something on our akiyama (cant remember what) and was getting to the end of the shift, so start the press to test it and trying to run ink up and a higher tickover speed engineer turns around between one of the units and has his shirt ripped off, was quite funny, luckily they were his work shirt so he had another one with him, otherwise it would have been a frosty journy home.

ill add more later, look forward to hearing yours

 

[CD102]

Had one guy at my work place working on a Roland 800. He had the roller guard up while washing up the unit. He used to wear button up shirts with long tails hanging out. Somehow he got his shirttail caught in rollers, tore his shirt right off.

One time we had an air leak or water leak on a Heidy on the drive side of the press. We had our presses elevated because we were a folding carton plant so the problem was under a catwalk. Maintenance man came out to the press. I was on break. I'm not sure if he informed my #2 he was going under the catwalk or not. Anyway, he got his arm around the drive motor and belts, got his shirt sleeve caught and ripped straight off, no injury to him thank goodness. Of course, this happened after lock out/tag out was supposed to be standard procedure and this maintenance guy was in charge of the plant safety program.

I still have the occasional nightmare about the low-oil warning signal on the Roland 800. We had one guy that could mimic it perfectly and sometimes we weren't sure if the press was singing or that guy was whistling the tones.

 

[madjock]

How about one of the shells on a CD102 falling off at 10,000 iph, that made one hell of a bang and it took Heidelberg 16 hours to extract it, after that the press was never the same again!

Or how about a superblue coming undone and bunching up into a ball to such an extent that it dented the impression cylinder, who would have thought that??

Or how about a starling landing in the yellow duct and getting well and truly stuck, we all wondered where the chirping was coming from, poor wee thing was three quarters dead at that point!!

 

[CD102]

Birds

Birds

This happened 30 years ago, before everyone got worried about cleanliness levels and keeping bugs out of the plant. We had an old 77" Miehle and it had no guards over the rollers. One day a sparrow or a robin flew right into the ink train. The operator knew he had a problem when he started finding feathers printed on the sheets.

Here's another one from almost 30 years ago. Same press had ancient electrics. It had a cabinet full of capacitors and tubes and it ran pretty warm. One of the press crew decided to put a can of beef stew on the top of it to heat up his dinner. I think the can had a pull tab top on it. Anyway, the can got so hot that it exploded. The crew ended up having to clean potato and carrot bits out of the rollers of one unit. As far as I know, the can didn't end up in the press.

 

[HachiZenki]

Hmm soul destroying eh? How about every day I go to work I seem to be the only one on the press with 3 other guys there. The lead is nowhere to be seen and the new guy is still hopeless after a year still dribbling ink everywhere he goes and once tried to put 2 plates on the same plate cylinder at the same time. The old 2nd pressman is lazy as shyte either hiding out in the ctp room or sitting his lazy arse at the desk pretending to be doing something, and the other pressman is either at the rewinder not helping with the make ready or roaming around somewhere else. Pretty much most of the maintenance is left to me do as well as the month end physical inventory, inventory reports, daily paperwork, and looking at my old W2's I see I've been making less and less money since 2006. That 'soul crushing' enough for ya?

 

[CD102]

HZ,

It's better than not having a job at all. And that's the situation that many of your printing brothers and sisters are having to deal with, myself included.

 

[Alex Arriaza]

i guess thats the daily routine in a offset company, worker that dont do the complete shifts, go to sleep early and left the work for the next day for someone else to finish it....
i got a good one, big client coated paper, matte finish, resista ink.. it was a book, no problem at all during the front side, but when it came to do the back side on all the fronts, it was a nightmare, even the impression got matte coating it was falling off the impression and ruining the paper beneath because of the weigh we had to pile 50 signatures of 4000 each in small batches of 300 the whole plant was covered by this small batches, now that i see it, it sounds fun but at that time it was a real headache.

 

[turbotom1052]

a press assistant i worked with years ago had this very annoying habit of reading the newspaper on top of the feeder load he was in the process of making. he tossed up a lift on the load without realizing that the wendsday edition of the new york daily news was still there. he had the crash bar up just before the infeed on the heidy we were workin on up cuz he was a lazy shit and didnt want to deal with having to lift it every time the feeder tripped. ran the damn newspaper through the first unit before the safety stopped the machine. he never read the paper on a load again after that!!!

 

[GazKL440]

Every second week i run an afternoon shift without an offsider, on a 40" komori....last week i did 91,000 impressions on monday, 87 on tuesday, and then only 57 on wednesday... but i had 7 make readies to do, impression and blanket washers to change. All this was listed in the run book, but i still got grilled by my production manager. Pissed off or WHAT??

A few years back we used to perforate on a modified 28" 6col aki, and were short handed so the same prod manager had to keep an eye on the thing whilst we ran between our rolands and komori's and loading for him.

This bloke gives us a heap of stick if we are not within a foot of our press at all times, so when he wandered off for about the tenth time (for about 10 mins) we decided to play a trick on him... A spare delivery gripper bar was hung out the end of the press, it was crashed stopped and sheets were torn up and scattered around the back of it.

When he came around the corner he went absolutely white and we thought he would have a heart attack....funny as hell

Note that he still has not lightened up...

 

[The Heidelberg Guy]

This bloke gives us a heap of stick if we are not within a foot of our press at all times, so when he wandered off for about the tenth time (for about 10 mins) we decided to play a trick on him... A spare delivery gripper bar was hung out the end of the press, it was crashed stopped and sheets were torn up and scattered around the back of it.

When he came around the corner he went absolutely white and we thought he would have a heart attack....funny as hell

Note that he still has not lightened up...

Good one Gaz!! Hahahaha