The South Exhibition Hall is probably two and a half time larger than the North Hall. I wondered what would be on display in this wing. As we moved in to the hall, the first thing that was obvious was the noise. A noise that was a mix of human and machine sounds. The mechanical din riding just above the vocal cacophony. The vista greeting exhibition visitor is one of massively multiple printing systems. I think it was Xerox and Heidelberg USA that establish the primary theme of print production. I remember visiting the Sun Times newspaper when I was in high school, not on a field trip, just out of curiosity. The street level access was well above the press room floor - the machines were massive, dwarfing the staff that worked them. The tops of the presses where the newsprint pages zipped by, only the large graphics almost readable, seemed to be a few feet below my hallway passage. The Heidelberg area had a similar layout of printers, conveyer belts, bundlers and what ever would fit into the category of post production, but the tops of the presses were slightly taller than the personnel running them. I don’t know the what kind of documents were being produced, we didn’t check, but I feel that this arrangement could handle at least a medium sized town newspaper.
It was all impressive, but my wife’s goals were smaller, more in keeping with classroom based production, metallic transfers, die cutters, and more samples of more exotic printed materials (color printing on clear film, florescent inks, metallic transfers). It was somewhere in this part of the journey when “I hit the wall.” I thought that I had had it, when I saw a small line formed at the Pittman booth. I followed it down and saw that the people at beginning of the line were walking away with die cut guitars on foam core backing. Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy, (from the Ren and Stimpy Show)! My wife got into the line, and I decided to record the actual process for her class. I only hoped that I would be able to hold the camera steady for, what I found out was, four minutes. I shot a second angle showing the cutting head. Each sheet cut contained five guitar forms, within fifteen minutes my wife was walking away with sample - very impressive. We also saw the printers that produced the images on the foam core, one took about fifteen minutes and the other wider faster one printed out the boards in two minutes. I recorded these printers.
The rest of the journey was pretty much of a blur, booths with products from China, Korea, Japan, Booths with misting systems (my wife wondered about the H1N1 flu), large die cutters, wire binding equipment and wire suppliers, offset printing replacement parts (I knew how this worked from my teaching at a vocational high school), cleaning supplies, metallic transfers, The Rochester Institute of Technology, and print publications. As we were winding down, with two sacks full of all sizes of samples, I spotted the company that handled small die cutters within the price range available to my wife - Roland DGA. I spoke with the staff of the booth, got a product description pamphlet, and picked up a large die cut sample of printing on clear film.
That was pretty much it. We snaked our way back out of the exposition and headed to the car. We discussed how tired we were, and how, students, on field trips, never seemed to run out energy. I pointed out a sign, we were passing, showing the next expo was early October 2010 - ‘Field Trip’ with students. Well, we were out of energy, I was glad to find the car , and leave. It was fun going out exploring the exposition with my wife.
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