I recently bought a Universal III with the automatic frisket / paper delivery option.
I’m looking for information about the automatic frisket part.
What would cause you to use a frisket versus the cloth tapes which is the only thing I’ve ever seen being used?
What do you use for the frisket material?
I’d love to have the photocopy. ray@wallflowerspress.com
The paper that came on the frisket tower of my Universal IIIs was similar to tympan as you mention, but has a waxy layer on the underside. As I understand it, frisketing may be useful to some using large photopolymer bases – things don’t have to be too far out of whack to cause some inking in dead areas. It may also provide better support than the tapes for the light stock and rice paper Eric mentioned above.
I have one of the Vandercook metal templates for cutting the end of the frisket roll sheet to go in to the gripper bar mounted end retainer for the Universal III and allow it to clearance the gripper adjusting knobs. If anyone wants a 1:1 photocopy of it to have one fabricated I will happily make one up.
I used to work at a shop with a Universal III with full frisket assembly. We only used the cloth tapes (in the margins away from the image of course), but the previous owner was a photengraver who would have used the frisket material which was used to block un-routed dead metal from printing, when proofing plates. The material on the roll looked like jute tympan paper, but I think it might have had a impervious asphalt layer on the back.
Used that way, fresh frisket would be pulled out for each form, and after an impression pulled on the frisket, a hole cut for the portion to be printed.
If you just want to support the sheet without masking out anything, roll kraft paper the correct width might work fine. The tapes by themselves don’t help much on light stock like rice paper for example.