I finally had the perfect job to test the new Anatol 6/6 on and figured I'd post up about it. This job was 'perfect' because it was: on thin muslin fabric that holds detail very well, was close to our max std. image size, was a detailed multi-color with butt reg., had white in the image and was printed wet-on-wet through high mesh counts.
I felt that repped our typical tighter-tolerance work pretty well and hey, why not give the pin-lock a fair shot for a minute. It's weekend work so I might as well take time to nerd out on this stuff while I can.
The Thunder was already paralleled on the install a few days ago so all I had to do was adjust the pin-lock platen off contact. An easy adjust and the only thing that requires a small wrench to do on the system. We're using a used setup (including a used platen) that I picked up for about 1/3 the cost of new with used pin corners as well. To boot, I'm not using 'full' carrier sheets, I'm using the short ones and I even cut all those down so my film is dangling off the bottom of it, barely overlapping (I can't bring myself to put a carrier between my film and the stencil, just seems stupid). Our device to reg the films to the screens is a little banged up, as it the film alignment board. I don't have the air hooked up so the screens were clamped manually. Oh and this film came off close to the end of a roll of 17" so it was a little curly. And...our expo bulb is so old I'm shocked it's still alive. My point in stating all this is to show this is a very 'real-world' situation.
I used the bottom reg marks as the test as manual printers who push stroke over long image areas are going to have the problems at that end more than the top. No matter how tight the rest of the system is, as a manual printer, you're going to be the weakest link so again, I'm gauging it on the ground not as a theoretical. My question wasn't 'does this pre-reg system work?' Of course it does. What I wanted to know was: 'does this new press hold reg?' and 'does this pre-reg system work
for me?'
From the reg marks, image is about 14" wide by 19.5" tall. I advertise our max image size for multi-color at 15"x18". These are cloth flyers for an indy art fair my friends put on here. 3 co.:
White 330/30
Blue 310/30
Maroon 310/30
in that order w-o-w
All screens @ 22 n/cm
For reference, 65lpi, 22.5 deg, round dot, on the whole lot of it. Dot shape isn't very important here, image is almost devoid of gradients and would look better as layers of threshold seps with blending of transparent inks.
First clean strike, bottom reg mark:
....White is off pretty bad on the bottom. It was just fine up top. So I based it down a little to eliminate the difference in stroke and struck off 3 more...still off so I did a single, simple micro adjust.
...and that's all it took. Anatol micros are effing great by the way. True linear travel and zero jump when you tighten them.
One thing to consider is that, as I mentioned above, the reg was off in the most error prone region of a print 1 1/2" longer than our std. image area and it was the White screen. It's highly likely an experienced auto user would not have had a mis-reg as I did.
Here's some more of the final strike off:
This one below has some white fill inside the text that I didn't clean up in PS (I did this from an .eps with the scanned art embedded and clipping masks out the wazoo, so I drug it into PS and channel sepped). Surprisingly it registered the two colors on that minute little bit of text. It's hard to see, but there's white in the middle of that 'a'. Again single micro here.
So there's the pin lock in real life. Curious to see how this works with the system better dialed in. But so far this is some solid shizzle and makes a case for continued use of newman frames despite the fact that we are running at medium-low tensions. Also hoping to get time to run my punched film experiment this winter using the system now that it appears to be a somewhat faithful control.
