Finally, after poring over old Heidelberg manuals for weeks and weeks, today Publicide cracked the code on perfect letterpress registration for any thickness of paper.
Credit here is due to the letterpress manuals, the Dolce Press blog, and my dear dear friend-designer and artist Cara Lynn Kleid.
Despite my attempts at center-fed registration, I was still burning up some serious paper (and sort time) with the 2/3rds method of registration. Which is where you miss one out of every 3 sheets and have to recycle it! Unbelievable, and certainly no way to print but I'm telling you it is so impossible to figure out these old machines.
Anyway, it turns out the Heidelberg 10x15 Windmill has its own set of registration-perfect guides that you clip inside the press for perfect runs. I was wondering what all the 'adjust for guides' signs were talking about. Anyway the guides are genius! Heidelberg does it again! Well, I mean they did it again, like in the mid 1800s I guess. Figuring out that the main gripper can't be trusted to register perfectly every time, they made it so the gripper can be set to drop the paper into the clip-in guides! But it is even cooler than it sounds because the machine waits until the sheet is perpendicular to the ground and then drops it on the guides. It is registered with gravity! Perfect, unfailing, always faithful Gravity. You just turn a little switch and set your guides and perfection ensues.
I seriously have been trying to figure out how anyone could have ever run CMYK process color on one of these things and just not figuring it out. BUT never fear, I now have a perfect understanding of how to accomplish this, and was entirely successful today printing two colors exactly perfectly one on top of the other on a whole big pile of cards. So amazing.
The other super best thing about this is that the gravity part makes it so that running insanely thick paper (cardboard, lunch bags, bound books. . . ) through this thing will only make the gravity work better! It seems that the mechanism gets more perfect as the paper gets thicker.
Stay tuned for wicked good Publicide printing merch that includes hairline letterpress registration.
