I had many similar memories. I was in the audio-visual service at my high school. The room with several "Ditto" brand spirit duplicators was next door. Sometimes, we would be asked to help print out materials. With three people in the small room cranking away on the duplicators, the air got quite rich with fumes. I took two years of printing as well. We had an Adressograph-Multigraph 1250. A few years later my experience would be very useful. I was in Southeast Asia, in the Air force, and nearing the end of my term. I was given a master of my orders out of there and told to go to the base print shop to get about a hundred copies made. As my luck always fell, there was no one there to make the copies and it would be about a week before there would be someone to make them. I asked for an explanation, and was shown the machine. It was a 1250. I was invited to print the copies if I knew how, and needless to say, had a stack of copies in a few minutes. It took a few more minutes to clean the blanket cylinder, raise the ink rollers, and put the water on standby. I departed to my next base on time.
Bruce Gentry, KA2IVY
Holy Moly !! except for the links, it sounds like you were talking exactly about ME !! First with the ditto carbons ... a sponge and rubbing alcohol for manual printing !! eventually my own desktop ditto with a drum for the alcohol ! In fact, I still HAVE the Model 80 and 1250s here ... For the Multiliths, I found a supply of PAPER masters that, if you typed on them with the right kind of ribbon, they would print maybe 100 to 150 copies ... really cheap! Jim w2jc (W2BVE way back then) On 8 Mar 2022 at 11:59, Harold Hallikainen via GreenK wrote:Looking at some of the processes: 1. I had a small mimeograph machine that printed postcards. It was a tabletop hand crank machine. I later got a mimeograph machine that would do letter size copies. 2. In elementary school, I got a typewriter ( https://hallikainen.org/gallery3/inde x.php/keh/keh1/adg ). At school, they used ditto machines to print class materials. The carbons were im the trash cans. I'd collect the carbons and make my own ditto master (type on paper with the carbon on the back putting backward inked type on the back of the paper). I'd then make copies by rolling the "master" with another piece of paper through the typewriter while brushing alcohol on the platen roller. The alcohol would soak through the copy paper and pick up ink from the master. The ditto carbons that I picked up out of the trash cans had been used to make ditto masters. As such, they had readable text on them. One teacher thought I was taking them to see test questions ahead of the test. 3. In high school, I got a Multilith model 80 offset press, then a model 1250. A local print shop let me use their copy camera to make negatives of the stuff I wanted to print. I'd tape the negatives into a masking sheet to layout the page. The masking sheet then went over a photosensitive plate, a sheet of glass out of an old TV was then put over the combination. I then exposed the plate to UV with a sunlamp. Developed the plate and onto the press it went. One of the projects run through this process on the 1250 is at https://miramonte1969.org/MUDS1969.pd f . Harold https://w6iwi.org 4. At one time I tried gelatin printing with a tray of Jello. That did not work very well. ______________________________________________________________ GreenKeys mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected]Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool:https://teletype.net/gksearch2002-to-present greenkeys archive:http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive:http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.htmlRandy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool:http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]______________________________________________________________ GreenKeys mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected]Jordan Spencer Cunningham's GreenKeys Search Tool: https://teletype.net/gksearch 2002-to-present greenkeys archive: http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/ 1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive: http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool: http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.htmlThis list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]