Visit to a Printer
Mar. 20th, 2007 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebToday I got to take a field trip to a printer, the printer where our course schedules are in the process of being printed. It was a much more blue-collar environment than I would have guessed requiring people with strength, coordination, and earpugs and with the smell of chemicals pervading the entire place beginning with the front door.
Our tour guide was very enthusiastic about how great everyone was and how exciting everything was. She did not convince me, probably because I was worrying about whether I would get back to work in time for a presentation I had to make. (I did not make it back in time, but I was only a little late and it was okay.) Still, I learned a few interesting things.
Some work is done on computers in an area that looks very similar to the cube I came from. Turning in everything as a PDF file has made things a lot easier, but pages still need to be properly organized and formatted to print on, in this case, forty-inch-wide sheets. There are lines added to aid in folding each sheet. There are bars added so each resulting packet of pages can be put in the proper order by lining them up the way the letter tabs on an address book or letter dimples in a dictionary are.
Then a plate is made. The plates we saw, though made of aluminum, were floppy and could be wrapped around a cylinder. Each one was loaded by hand into a machine that applied the designs via laser. This process involves at least two different chemicals and a thorough monthly cleaning. No, I don't really have a clue what happens, but I think photographers might.
Then you use this sheet to somehow ink the large pieces of paper in a machine several feet wide and many feet long, in this case, that can do two-color printing or black double-sided printing. The resulting quality of this type of printing is still higher than what you can get with current photocopiers.
I'm afraid I found the binding to be more interesting than the printing.
The pages are scored and folded--scored so that no air gets trapped when folded.
All the folded-up pages required for the book are stacked and each stack is fed into another machine. (You can tell when one book ends and other book begins by looking at the placement of those bars I talked about.)
First one side is sawn off (loudly!) to leave a rough edge, then the edge is dragged through very hot glue, then over a roller that smooths the glue and wipes off the excess. Then the book continues around the corner and is lined up over the cover, dropped on the cover, and pressed into the cover as the cover is folded around it. The covered books are deposited in a stack where a human grabs them, removes them from the machine, and tamps them. Everything in this paragraph happens on one machine with one person inserting the pages and one removing them. I didn't see who loaded the covers. It's easy to stop the machine, though.
Then the other three sides are cut using the latest in guillotine technology. Or at least I noticed the blade was slanted which was an improvement in guillotine blades over straight ones. (Fellow tourists dragged me to some icky places in Europe where I was forced to learn this.) These blades also did not move directly up and down but also a little in the direction of the line of the cut.
On one cutting machine, the loading took place far from the blades and the books were automatically pushed to the right spot, cut, and pushed back out. On another machine, the books had to be loaded directly under the blades, which looked a little scarier to me. But then you remove your hands completely and push the button to begin the cutting.
Our tour guide considered the other employees to be an exotic and wonderful mixture of artisan and technician. It takes both precision and a good feel to adjust everything appropriately and keep things running smoothly.
Our tour guide was very enthusiastic about how great everyone was and how exciting everything was. She did not convince me, probably because I was worrying about whether I would get back to work in time for a presentation I had to make. (I did not make it back in time, but I was only a little late and it was okay.) Still, I learned a few interesting things.
Some work is done on computers in an area that looks very similar to the cube I came from. Turning in everything as a PDF file has made things a lot easier, but pages still need to be properly organized and formatted to print on, in this case, forty-inch-wide sheets. There are lines added to aid in folding each sheet. There are bars added so each resulting packet of pages can be put in the proper order by lining them up the way the letter tabs on an address book or letter dimples in a dictionary are.
Then a plate is made. The plates we saw, though made of aluminum, were floppy and could be wrapped around a cylinder. Each one was loaded by hand into a machine that applied the designs via laser. This process involves at least two different chemicals and a thorough monthly cleaning. No, I don't really have a clue what happens, but I think photographers might.
Then you use this sheet to somehow ink the large pieces of paper in a machine several feet wide and many feet long, in this case, that can do two-color printing or black double-sided printing. The resulting quality of this type of printing is still higher than what you can get with current photocopiers.
I'm afraid I found the binding to be more interesting than the printing.
The pages are scored and folded--scored so that no air gets trapped when folded.
All the folded-up pages required for the book are stacked and each stack is fed into another machine. (You can tell when one book ends and other book begins by looking at the placement of those bars I talked about.)
First one side is sawn off (loudly!) to leave a rough edge, then the edge is dragged through very hot glue, then over a roller that smooths the glue and wipes off the excess. Then the book continues around the corner and is lined up over the cover, dropped on the cover, and pressed into the cover as the cover is folded around it. The covered books are deposited in a stack where a human grabs them, removes them from the machine, and tamps them. Everything in this paragraph happens on one machine with one person inserting the pages and one removing them. I didn't see who loaded the covers. It's easy to stop the machine, though.
Then the other three sides are cut using the latest in guillotine technology. Or at least I noticed the blade was slanted which was an improvement in guillotine blades over straight ones. (Fellow tourists dragged me to some icky places in Europe where I was forced to learn this.) These blades also did not move directly up and down but also a little in the direction of the line of the cut.
On one cutting machine, the loading took place far from the blades and the books were automatically pushed to the right spot, cut, and pushed back out. On another machine, the books had to be loaded directly under the blades, which looked a little scarier to me. But then you remove your hands completely and push the button to begin the cutting.
Our tour guide considered the other employees to be an exotic and wonderful mixture of artisan and technician. It takes both precision and a good feel to adjust everything appropriately and keep things running smoothly.
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schedules
on 2007-03-21 04:38 am (UTC)Re: schedules
on 2007-03-22 01:21 am (UTC)We also recently quit printing grades although I think you can still request a printout, in writing, etc.
So, I suspect you're not wrong.