I have no idea what these are
Hi folks. I recently rescued a Craftsmen Monarch from obscurity and going through the bonus box that came with it I came across the items in the attached photo stuffed in with a small amount of furniture.
They look like they were designed for a specific purpose although maybe nothing to do with printing.
My knowledge of all things letterpress is very limited so I am turning to you for help.
Thanks!
-sean
monarch-unidentified-01.jpg
Look like name plate holders for office desks.
Perhaps bookbinders’ backing boards, used to turn over the edge of a round-backed book in the finishing press. Hard to tell, though.
dcrnkovic -no. they are not !
They might have nothing to do with printing at all, just stuff which ended up in there.
Over the years I have seen stuff which didn’t matter being together with printing presses.
Letterpressmen are the daughters of the mother of all invention , Those pieces of wood were probably part of someones set-off prevention system . Just add a thin plywood base wider than the job required so you have a box with two sides when nearly full add the next pair and a board at the end of the run you have a stack with divisions every half inch or so and no risk of set off as the added weight is born by the blocks sitting on one another not the whole weight f the top of the stack on its lower portion .
They could also just be random crap , Has anyone found pieces of hose pipe two inch long , usually two of them, split down the length, in the drawer of their heidelberg ?
Just old crap till you see a use for them !!
mike is right, those are holders for name plates, the plastic plate goes in the cut in the holder and is held at a slight angle. have one on my desk with my name on it (so i don’t forget who i am)
Looks like kindling wood to me ;)
Nice walnut scrap … until you re-purpose it.
Ha! Thanks guys. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some really clever piece of kit. I guess it either goes to the scrap pile or off to the desk of one of my executive friends. I like the setoff idea, but there’s only five :)
-sean
Peter Luckhurst could be right; many problems handling paper. We had to take precautions against set-off with a small (desk-top) offset press, church newsletter; we laid out stacks of sheets on pews of church after they had been through the press, each stack about 200 sheets, dry enough after an hour.
At weekly newspaper where I worked for a year, problems with auto-fed press [letter-press], recently I wondered if it was variable moisture in stack of paper waiting to be printed; maybe they should have taken off a quarter of the stack from the top, and run till a misfeed, then take the rest of the stack away, start using a fresh stack; variation in humidity? One pressman got 600 impressions in 12 hours, then the press started feeding OK [2000 an hour] with no changes that we could identify from our tiny experience.
I saw a large jobbing shop on bank of a wide river; they had problem printing small multi-coloured labels, changes in dimensions of very large sheet because of widely-variable humidity; air-conditioning not much used in those days. They had moved from a dry location.
An Australian biscuit (cracker in USA) manufacturer moved the site of the factory to another town a few hundred kilometres away, golden handshake to older employees; problem with product till they called back the old men who knew how to work with varying humidity during production run.
Alan.
Alan ,
you will have met those bits of hose too !!