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Screen/Pad Printing History - Part 2How Autoroll re-created European pad printing machines and silicone printing pads in the US |
Again for the same reason I looked for yet another product line and on a trip to New York visited a little company in Brooklyn where a Tampoprint machine existed. It was the first Tampoprint machine in the US. It was a small tabletop unit and the owner of the company had the rights to sell Tampoprint machines in the US but had no luck in selling them. He had no organization and no marketing skills and he was looking to sell his distributorship and he offered it to me for $25,000. I told him that I was very interested and wanted to talk directly with the manufacturer, Wilfried Philipp, which I did and I offered to buy the rights to market the machines in the US but also wanted a license to manufacture certain of the models here. He refused and the deal never went through. Ben: You are talking about pad printing right now. Can you explain a little bit about the process? Bill: As you know, pad printing utilizes today a silicone rubber pad to transfer images from an etched plate to a non-uniform surface. When one first sees a pad printer function it appears to be magical because one wouldn't dream that you could print walnuts accurately or golf balls accurately with undistorted images. And yet the process certainly allows it. Ben: You approached Tampoprint at the time to see if you could buy the rights to the machine for the US and he wasn't interested. So then what happened after that? Bill: Well, he turned us down. He was willing to let us distribute his machines if we bought the rights but turned us down in our request to manufacture the machine on the license. I determined that Autoroll had to develop a similar type machine. So we did some research and we found that the process was not a new process; pad transfer printers had been used in Switzerland for years for printing watch faces and had been used in the US for years for printing ceramic dinnerware and bowls. The only difference was that the older versions of the machine used gelatin pads to transfer the image. Gelatin pads were very fragile and required climate controlled rooms for them to function properly. What Wilfried Philipp had done, what Tampoprint had done, was developing a silicone rubber pad that replaced the gelatin pad and it was both durable and long lasting. So I came back and sat down with some of my design people and we quickly designed a very simple machine that duplicated the Tampoprint motions. The real challenge was developing a silicone rubber pad - we didn't know it was silicone at the time - that would work and transfer inks and that took probably the best part of two years. I first saw a Tampoprint machine in 1966 or 1967 and it wasn't until 1969 that we were able to manufacture pads that were able to properly print. We immediately put a couple of machines in the decorating company and went out looking for decorating work so that we could de-bug the machines and use our decorating company as a beta site and we did that quite successfully. And then the pad printing machines took off at an amazing pace. Pad printers in those days were used for printing doll faces, dolls eyes, all kinds of sporting goods devices including baseballs, softballs and golf balls. We worked closely with Spalding and Chicopee and all of the major toy companies. And then when we understood what the capabilities of pad printing were we began to introduce it to lots and lots of different applications and found that we could save people lots of labor expense and create far more efficient decorating operations with pad printing. We got to a point where we were building pad printers 50 at a time and probably built as many as 150 or more a year when we got into 1970-71 and 72. In 1970 I built a new building and we moved in in 1972 and the company just continued to expand with the three product lines we had. We continued to run the decorating company as a beta site and training site very effectively. Our customers were Avon, Revlon, Shoultan, all of the major cosmetic and toiletries companies and the major household chemical companies. We printed for Kodak, we printed for Breck Shampoo, all the suntan lotion companies and on and on and on. Ben: What inks did you use for those applications? Who were the ink manufacturers? Bill: Sinclair and Valentine was one manufacturer. There were a couple of local companies. In those days we were using enamels and they were slow drying. That of course tended to slow production down and complicate production. And it always required large conveyorized dryers and utilized a lot of floor space. |
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