One of my first jobs at Delta was mopping floors on Saturday morning when I was 10 years old. It was hard work with an industrial mop that soaking wet probably weighed half as much as me. In those days my family's company often had a shift working over the weekend and we had an old Heidelberg KORD printing press. I used to love watching it print - and taking a break from mopping was always good. It was the first printing press that made offset printing relatively easy and reliable and Heidelberg sold thousands of them. It was a huge machine to a small boy and the particular sound that the press made during a print run was memorable. Most of the noise came from the feed board which is the part of the press responsible for getting the paper smoothly into the machine.
It was a brilliant design - it pulls the paper down an arched board and then pushes the sheet from the right or left edge. The sheet then can "register" or square itself in the press before the printing begins. This is all old school mechanics that still apply to this day. At times I have had to explain the process to a new prepress artist and my best way of explaining how it works it to use the zero/zero point on the Illustrator art board as an example of what "register" does. Long ago we sold that machine and the memory of that special sound came back when we bought a brand new 2-color Heidelberg GTO printing press. 50 years after the design was in production - it was intact in this new press and when it started for the first time - it took me back.
-Sean
http://deltagraphics.com
