Category: Letterpress for beginners
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Earlier topic: Buying an Adana 8x5

Impressions in greeting cards

I’m new at this and am hoping to get some advice on printing greeting cards.
I have an 8x12 c&p, when I press it can see the indentation through the stock on the other side of the stock.
Is this a packing issue? How do I reduce this?

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You have too much soft packing, like sheets of paper. You need hard packing like sheets of mylar (Dupont trademark for polyester), or pressboard. You only need one or two sheets of paper on top of the hard packing, and under your tympan.

Also, have you reduced the amount of packing as much as possible, while still getting a good print?

Probably. Possibly exacerbated by a poorly adjusted platen. A hard packing of pressboard or mylar or something similar is what you want.

If you use soft packing (newsprint, copy paper, etc.) the type will compress both the paper you’re printing and the packing. Hard packing will compress significantly less and so you only compress your paper, leaving the back surface flat, because the packing has no indentation for the paper to be pressed into.