Back from the bowels of repro hell

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I came across this sucker about 6 weeks ago, but forgot I had the pic in my phone…. now you get to check it out. For those of you that have no idea what you are looking at, this is called a Vaccum Frame machine. It is basically a big glass table with lights underneath used to reproduce old “blue line” prints that were composed of multiple layers of tracing paper or mylar, the important part is that the vaccum sucked all the pages close together to prevent registration errors during reproduction. Whoah!

Even more significant is that any successful repro house or architectural/engineering practice had one of these behemoths until about 1995 and then they all died a silent death as inkjet and laser plotting coupled with affordable CAD software came on the scene full time.

Unless you’ve done it, it is pretty tough to explain and I’ve spent about 20 minutes at google to find a good description and nothing pops up. Maybe I’ll put up a description and some diagrams another time.

Amazing example of 1960’s reproduction tehcnology huh? And dig the fancy prop to hold open the lid, yes folks that is a log.

You can find this beast at CLR Design in Philly.

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