Split fountain on a Windmill
I do a number of split fountain jobs but always run them on my SP-20 with the crescent removed. I saw this today on the FPO blog – http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2013/10/german-torres-bus... – and was surprised that it was done on their Windmill.
What type of control do you have to be able to maintain the color split? I don’t think you can turn the oscillating action off, can you?
jonsel-
I do not know of a way to turn off the oscillating on a Windmill. It looks like they only had a run of 250 cards 4 up, which is a press run of 65 sheets or so. They must have run those sheets before the ink had a chance to mix all the way across. Pretty neat trick for a short run.
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Split fountains on the Windmill are a lot of fun! Like jfitz mentions, they are great for short runs.
I recommend adding a little transparent base in between the different colors when you set up the ink fountain as it will help the colors stay separated longer. Especially at a higher press speed, the colors will blend together fairly quickly.
For the best/longest separation of split fountain colors, we add little triangular separators designed for Heidelberg offset presses into our Heidelberg letterpresses. See the attached photo for reference.
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Look at the steel rider in the back, if they unhook the bolt left of the machine for the distributor roller and adjust the fountain, they can un this.
I may just have to ink up one and day mess around with it. I’d like to be able to do this for runs of 1,000 or 2,000.
The pic appears to show a Heidelberg K series Cylinder fountain. An advantage with these presses is you can regulate the reciprocation of the steel distributor rollers from 0” - 1 3/16”.
The ink train in the Tiegel is much more limiting.
^^Agree. The large ink drum also oscillates.
rontxhou has a great eye! That photo shows the fountain of a Heidelberg KS.