Yea I've been doing this for 7.5 years now. Started in Finishing (bindry) packing a box, worked my way up to jogger then cutter. After 2 years I got into the prepress end making plates. The plant has been thruogh some ups and downs so I'm back in the plate room for now.
I have seen some wild things in my short time here, we've tried running so many diffrent substraits its not even funny. Polyweave was wild, it was made for injection molded plastics, namely anti freeze jugs. Well it streched when it was sheeted, streched when it was printed, curled when it set so it was impossible to jog and was a pain to cut. T-3 ran well on a 40" but gave us problems on our 51". Everybody liked it except the customer. Label lyte is good stuff, looks great after its printed, its just not cost efficent. Now we got some stuff called Ultra Tuff (as in ultra tuff to sheet,print,get the ink to stick to) you have to use a quick dry ink, run the powder way up and it looks like crap, however it is cheap so we continue to sell it.
I guess my greatest accomplishment is that I've held production records on all the equiment I've operated for over 5 weeks. Held the jogging record 3 times. Still hold straight knife record (4,140,000 in 8 hour shift) and all the plate making records. Of course I did all those things when I was younger and cared more. However after getting the screws put to you enough you tend to stop caring.
Technolgy is wonder full as long as it dosent put people out of work, but stuff like that happens. Our Trendsetter kicks butt! I can run more plates on it in 8 hours than I could on 2 Krauses in 12 hours.(anybody in the market for a Krause?) The new CD press will perfect12500 an hour with NO MARKING! If we did not have a perfect unit Heidelberg guarentees 15k an hour with no marking. Oh well I've rambled on enough as it is, got to go back to making plates.[uzi]