TechworkLife

The Harris Offset Press Submarine

Back when digital printing was just a gleam in an MIT professor's eye, I worked as a college student on Harris 57" Offset presses. These printed folding cartons for packaging (like diaper or spark plug packages). It was a pretty good job for the summer, except for the rotating shifts that messed with your sleep. I was a press helper on large 5 and 6 color presses that seemed to me quite similar to a submarine, with the tight spaces, catwalks, and crew. These were large machines with lots of lubrication points, gearings, and places to injure you. The presses were about the length of a tractor-trailer truck, with columns of offset rollers demanding you keep them filled with inks and shellac as thousands of sheets were run through.

There was the Captain (Pressman) and First Mate (Assistant Pressman) and crew (Press helpers). The Feeder was a skilled job (like a sonar man or chief officer) who made sure that cut sheets kept feeding into the press as long as it was running. I was at the bottom of the totem pole, doing the dirtiest jobs. Despite this, I liked that the building was air-conditioned (to help stabilize the paper) and long runs of paper allowed snacking around the delivery end. Every so often you would have to remove the printed sheets (each job had a limit to the number of sheets that could be stacked) that sat on a pallet. Two elevators with two pallets were switched between to accomplish this. A mechanical lever was pulled to divert printed sheets to the backup pallet as one lowered the primary to the floor (and trucked it away) and placed a new empty pallet on the rising elevator. Timing was everything. No controls were digital and eye/hand coordination was key to successful operation.

A good crew could keep the press humming as new sheets were fed in at the back (the feeder used pneumatic "swords" to separate the paper sheets on an ascending lift and then tuck in a new stack of paper below it) while press helpers fed ink into the ink troughs and removed printed material at proper intervals. The pressman and assistant would pull sheets every so often for quality control and make adjustments in the alignments and colors. In fact, "make ready" is the name for the time spent on setting up the press (installing the plates, setting the feeds and other mechanicals) before running the job.

I am looking for pictures to include in these descriptions as I also have worked on web presses (rotogravure) with less fond memories. I will be adding some other posts about printing as an analog process. It is interesting that the Harris Company has now divested itself from any printing presses and is devoted to electronics for government and industry.