things i wish i had known (but now you can know them)

you can change out the tympan on the vandercook.

Please don’t laugh. If you sift through my posters you’ll see plenty of registration issues and slight changes in pressure, and that’s likely because I was packing several sheets of paper under the grippers every time I ran a poster through the press. I don’t recommend this because it often caused my posters to become slightly misaligned, which made a big difference when I was trying to make a print with tight registration. Changing the packing in the tympan would have standardized the amount of pressure I was using on each poster. It also would have freed me from cramming tons of paper in the grippers, saving time and ensuring that each poster is aligned at exactly the same point every time.

if your block is inking up unevenly, check your rollers first.

I worked in MIAD’s print lab, which is a student letterpress shop that tends to get a lot of heavy traffic followed by long quiet stretches. I made the mistake of assuming that the rollers on my SP15 were set to type high and that my Marmoleum blocks were inking up unevenly because of one of the many other variables I had introduced. Turns out, nope! Matt Presutti mentioned that I might want to check the rollers once I was several posters deep, and it turns out I had one hardly making contact and another completely off-kilter.

you might have to get comfortable with power tools.

I started this project pretty wary of the woodshop. I can’t say that we’re friends yet, but we tolerate each other. A unique thing about this medium is that sometimes when you encounter a composition issue, you have no choice but to saw your block apart. I forgot to consider the Vandercook’s quarter-inch gap at the top of the print when I made my first attempt at laser cut linoleum, and I couldn’t have finished those print jobs if not for the table saw.

On another note, I had consistent issues with laser “scan lines” appearing in the negative space of my prints. This happened because the laser cutter does not engrave very deeply, so there was little difference between positive and negative space. Since I put an entire 12x18” block on the press, the paper would easily get pressed into those large areas of shallow negative space. I could have gotten rid of the scan lines entirely by sawing my blocks apart, keeping only the active area, and reconstructing the poster in a lockup. Maybe this would have taken way longer, but I spent so many hours fighting scan lines that it’s hard to say!

adding material is way easier than taking it away.

I began my quest to eliminate the scan lines by carving them away, but somehow that made the problem worse. I had replaced the somewhat subtle fuzz with loud, scratchy chatter! After MUCH trial and error, I finally devised a strategy for solving the issue. I would cut chipboard to match the shape of my design, then tape it to the back of the block. This left the negative space without any backing material to raising it to type high, which would eliminate a lot of the scan lines. If that didn’t solve it, I would place backing paper behind my poster with a hole cut out in the shape of the scan lines I wanted to exclude. My last line of defense was placing a “bookmark” in the grippers in front of my poster– this is a reinforced piece of paper shaped in order to block the scan lines but allow the active area to print on the poster underneath. (essentially a mask– I tried this with mylar, but it immediately ripped!)

There are still some scan lines and chatter in my final prints, but I think you can see the improvement from 1 to 5.

be careful when cleaning up linoleum dust.

If you look at the bottom of my posters, particularly the earlier ones, you can see that my colophon barely shows up. Not to mention the many issues I had with pressure and inking, I think this is actually because of how I cleaned my plates when they came out of the laser cutter.

Linoleum kicks up a LOT of dust during laser cutting. Getting rid of the dust is a lot more work than you’d expect. You should regularly wipe the dust out of the laser cutter to avoid a fire hazard and clean the optics to keep them from breaking. You’ll need to engrave your plate twice in order to achieve a usable depth for printing, and the second cut causes something strange to happen. Dust from the first cut will have settled all over the block, and the laser’s heat on the second cut will cook the dust into a gummy substance all over the printing surface. (you can’t fix this by dusting off the plate before the second cut because the plate needs to be in exactly the same spot in order for the cut to be accurate) This means that when you take the plate out, not only do you have to brush off fresh dust, you also have to sand away the gummy cooked dust or else the printing area won’t pick up ink.

Knowing this, I think I needed to give special attention to my tiniest letters in between laser cuts. I think I could have dusted them while they were in the machine to keep the first layer of dust from being cooked into the crevices of the letters and ruining their printability.