A postscript to last week's entry about printing the drawings that appear on pages in Aurora Teardrops. As mentioned, these runs involved unusual positioning of the sheets in the press for bleeds, so the plan was to make do with the existing windows cut in the frisket, and then recover it before moving on to printing the text (on points; because the sheets were being placed on the tympan in odd & varying orientations for the drawings, the points had to be removed).
Anyway, halfway through printing the drawings the cord tied to the hanging frisket hook broke, and the frisket crashed down and right through my hand: big hole. Luckily, the drawings offered a lot of leeway when printing, so I was able to finish them off by simply patching the broken frisket cover with tape. Yes, I am a lazy, lazy man. But recovering the frisket is a messy (scrapping away the old paper glued to the frame) and fussy (attaching the new cover and then waiting to see if it will dry flat) affair; just one of those attributes would be enough to make me avoid it.
(Checking Rummonds on a technical matter related to this calamity, I found the following on page 296: "SAFETY TIP If the frisket were accidentally to fall and hit you on the head, it would most likely knock you out. When an overhead support is not feasible [he means a wooden stay or brace], be inventive; for years in Verona, I propped my frisket up with a cardboard tube." I don't want to install a fixed stay, so I think I'm going to attach the hook with two cords now, and replace them annually.)
I'm printing one more thing before getting into the text, and so did a quick patch repair to the frisket. It's a single large area being printed, so even the tympan packing has to be changed out. With this run done before the end of the day, I'll start scraping the old frisket away and put a new one on tomorrow. Then on to the text...
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