Anyone into 3D printing here?

Printing...I am....it's my job

He's not talking puffy ink on business cards......the other kind of 3-d printing..

As y'all know, I am/was a bookbinder (in the printing industry) in the past... and speaking of that 'puffy ink on business cards' .... I have done alot of that.... it is called Virko type (thermography).... where you use special ink and then spread powder on it and it raises the lettering ....


Terrible job to cut on the guilotine.... each sheet has to be dry and the Virko solid.... too much pressure on the guillotine clamp and it either squashes the Virko type..... or the whole block of paper sticks like a block of concrete


Just in case you absolutely had to know

http://claremont.revprint.co.za/virko-printing/

I had done a little bit of that way way back, I worked in a print shop, mostly doing lay up and process camera work, not much actual printing, but some binding, collating and grunt work. I did like the process camera stuff, remember that? waxing and actual cutting and pasting to a board? ah fun times! I worked at a Large stereo store in the ad department it was fun.

Everything is digitized nowadays.
Paste ups are a thing of the past.
Hell....I am the only one in town with an actual printing press.
Which is nice because there are still certain things that can be done only the old fashioned ways of offset printing.

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I left school early at age 16 got a job with a local newspaper publisher .... they printed one daily newspaper and two weekly papers plus they had a large commercial print dept for business cards , wedding invitations , restaurant menus , letterheads , just about everything .

My main job was in the advertising department , I would call on all the local businesses to get their newspaper advertising , then I would sit at a drawing board and sketch out (in pencil) a rough idea of what the ad should look like , I would pick the type size and fonts and pictures then give those instructions to the composing room and the workers there would cast everything in lead .

They had what looked like a huge typewriter , called a Linotype machine .... type out a sentence and the machine assembled a series of brass molds that would end up cast in lead to assemble in the presses.

For pictures I would go to a huge set of books that contained every conceivable picture (except porn) ... so say I needed a picture of a car or a truck or suit or dress , I cut it out with scissors and pasted it on my layout. Down in the composing room they would have the corresponding "mat" which was a mold of the picture and pour hot lead into it to make a reverse image for the press.

Interesting , never saw the powder method . Where I worked they did some raised lettering on fancy stuff like wedding invitations.

It was amazing to watch the procedure .... all the print stock was pre-cut to the exact size ... placed into a regular press and most of the printing done there .... once about 50 were done the operator would grab a batch and put them into another machine which was just a press which force the paper lettering into a raised position .... then he would put the batch into another machine that folded it in two ..... and then the neatest machine of all would take the folded wedding invitation and put it into an envelope.

It was all done by one operator surrounded by all those machines churning them out about one-per-second ... yet most of the time the operator would be relaxed and looking at samples thru a magnifier to make sure they were perfect ... like I said , it was amazing to watch.

It was cool back then, I got to use my airbrush to touch up pictures, add highlights etc. on large photos or drawings of stereo equipment, then reduce them on the camera with a halftone filter for newspaper ads. As a bonus I got to buy stereo and car stereo equipment at cost +10% as an employee.

I remember when the first digital audio came out . The first digital I heard was Pink Floyd dark side of the moon, they had a special room for the high end stuff "audiophile" Not sure what the player was but the speakers were Boston Acoustics amplified speakers but on the track "time" when the alarm clocks went off, you could tell that they were set up in rows, it was like true 3-D sound, very cool stuff for early 1980's.

I then got a job in a print shop working from 8:00 am-noon, went home, ate lunch and changed clothes, and then worked at the tire store changing tires and brakes from 1:00-7:;00 pm.