Do you file your plates?

[GazKL440]

We dont re-use plates on our large format presses, but do keep about 50% of our GTO plates unless they are dated of course.. As mentioned above it takes far less time to re-output than to prep them for storage..and then chances are there will be changes to the job.. with the semi auto plate mounting system on the 40 inch i would not recommend saving and re-using purely as the plates require very precise bending to be installed, and am betting that you would mess it up by gumming it...

[Grnofslt]

The company I currently work for had 3 offset presses each with their own storage area. When we initially prepare the plates for the first printing, we create a sleeve of heavy (14Pt or greater) paper that is sized to allow the plate and first piece samples to be inserted easily. These sleeves have our plate identification number on both sides down one edge. We also put a color coded year and month sticker on the same edge of the plate sleeve. When the job is completed, the pressman places the plate into the storage area in numerical order. If we haven't run a job in 3 years (as indicated by the year/month stickers) we recycle the plates. But if we re-run jobs, we update the year month stickers so we know that the job has been re-run and is current. To store the plates, the pressman is supposed to clean them thoroughly, rinse them thoroughly with water to remove the press wash/ink residue and then apply a gum arabic-water solution for preserving the plate and preventing oxidation. If the gum solution has to much gum, then it is hard to get the plate to take ink properly. But it really is the pressman's responsibility to insure that his stored materials are in proper condition.

One thing I have noticed though, once the plate is thrown out, about 50% of the time (at least with the company i work for) that old customer will re-order and then we have to remake the plate. Our boss wants us to throw out all of our old masking sheets (also stored by press type and numerically) that haven't been printed in the last three years. This is harder to do because sometimes, these old masking sheets are the only artwork we might have for a job.

[kyle]

We always toss the plates (CTP) when we're done, even if we know there is likely to be an exact reprint in the near future. Most of our reprints have a few minor changes, so if we saved plates it wouldn't pay off very often, if ever (the material cost may well be less than the labor cost of washing and gumming).

If you want to discriminantly save some plates, remember that the person who has the best idea of the likelyhood of an exact reprint is the customer. If you gave them the option to pay a small extra fee for washing, gumming and archiving plates so that they may save money on reprints, wether or not they chose that option would tell you how likely they are to reorder without changes.

[dkelliher@carterprinting.com]

We have six different presses that use 4 different plate sizes. We make over 30,000 plates a year. We found that storing plates is cost prohibitive because of several reason: takes up valuable floor space, cannot always be assurred plates will "come back" ready for a second use and recycling returns ($$) were pretty good until recent months.

We store most of our stripped plate files on our SANs for easy access for a reprint need, which comes around often enough. We do not store any plate files if the printed material is dated.

On some of the older presses we can reuse plates several times, yet on our semi automated or fully automated plate loader presses we generally do not.

We do charge for plates in every reprint job for you might have to remake one or two over and who should pay for that?

Dan Kelliher