A Full Plate
Source: Photo by Susan Mohr on Unsplash
From the day I was introduced to this office I was always interested in the printing press. So when the day came to actually use it I was a little more than excited. The press is pretty big and it looked almost unmovable. I was shocked when I learned that the press wasn’t always there.
The first big project I worked on was called “plating”. I worked on this with another student from City Tech who was also interning there.
Separate from modern digital printing, you can’t send a file to this press to make prints. The process of doing this requires creating “negatives” which are black pieces of film with cut-outs of your original image on the computer. With my partner we taped and aligned these negatives on yellow pieces of paper. Taking a razor we cut the back of the yellow paper to expose only the important information on the negative.
The next step was applying the negative to a plate. The plate was a slim, rectangular, green piece of metal. We applied the negative on top of this plate and put them both into a vacuum chamber. Once the chamber did its magic, the information on the negative showed up blue on the plate.
My partner and I were both amazed by this development. It was pretty cool to see this reaction first hand. After the plate was developed we rubbed a solution on the plate which wiped the green away but the blue stayed. At this point the plating was done and all we had to do was let it dry.
Overall this was a great experience, my partner and I worked very well, sharing the tasks and responsibilities. I feel that we both contributed a lot to the project and equally shared the labor.
