Introduction Printing ink is so much more than just the black stuff that you put on a page. It has been around for thousands of years, and it's been used in everything from newspaper presses to digital printers. As you can see, we're not talking about offset printing ink which is oil based. I want to have a little fun and talk about how you can make your own ink for your printer. At home! Ready? Ingredients You will need the following ingredients: Soot (5 tbsp) : This is as purest as it gest. You can make the soot yourself by holding a glass up to a flame. This will allow you to slowly accumulate the soot. Water (2 tbsp): For the base of your ink, use distilled water so that you don't introduce any impurities into the mix. Distilled water is also easier to clean up than tap water because there are no minerals or residue left behind from tap water. Alcohol (2 tbsp) (grain alcohol): This ingredient works as a preservative for your ink and allows it to last for several mo
All your pressmen are lined up and you're ready to go. If you're good at what you do, the next events are probably a tightly controlled and efficient makeready. In today's entry I want to talk about what makes a makeready efficient. I've written about making a makeready faster before , but this time I wanted to focus more on the procedures and tools that we use to be more efficient. Most modern four color presses can do a full color makeready in 5 minutes - if you do it right. Servo drives enable a different pressman to load plates on each unit separately. Some presses have automatic plate loading capability. But for those that don't have a super fast modern high tech offset press to work on, let's go over a few basic principles that will help with troubleshooting paper waste and time, the two biggest variables in an offset press makeready. The tool that is going to help you the most in this race is the lowest tech resource of all, a checklist. F