Strange Impression with deep relief plates

Hi,

This is a question for people who aren’t offended by using letterpress to get an impression into the stock.

We’ve been successfully printing with standard polymers, and mag plates before that, and achieving the detailed impression we’ve been after with few problems. However I have a deep relief base and have been eager to use it. I ordered the plates and they arrived today, BUT neither of them are giving me a nice detailed impression/deboss, they do make an impression but there’s no definition around details, e.g. The impression on a line of text is just a block surrounding it.

I think i’ve been this on other peoples work so maybe it’s just common with deep relief plates?

any advice apreciated.

Log in to reply   4 replies so far

What is the packing you are using behind your paper? You need to make sure that the packing is hard so that you are compressing only the sheet that is being printed, not the packing behind it.

Also very important- the sheet you are printing must be thicker than the amount you intend to deboss it.

Daniel Morris
The Arm Letterpress
Brooklyn, NY

Hi,

I’m doing everything normally, I get great results with standard plates. I use hard packing and the card is 430gsm soft cotton paper. same as when I’ve tried deep relief but no such luck, maybe I’m being picky.

Any other suggestions?

thanks btw

Would you be able to post a good clos-up photo of the problem?

problem solved, deep relief plates made from different material, more rubber like.