Small printer that prints on mountboard

[tebbles]

Anyone any recommendations on printers that can print direct to mountboard? I will only be using this to print captions to mount, so don't need anything fancy.

[Not your average framer]

Letraset used to make something that you could run through an A4 size printer and then apply to a flat paper surface and what you had printed was what stuck to that surface, but I can't remember what it was called. Letraset was a real big deal in the 1960's and 1970's, but as computers and graphics software came on the scene, much of this sort of thing fell by the wayside.

The also was something called Omnichom which was available from Letraset, which could be laid over black printing from a laser printer and feed through the printer as a black sheet and the toner would re-melt and bond the pigment on the omnicrom to the area that had been printed by the laser printer. On modern printers you need to increase the toner intensity setting to maximum to get this to work at it's best.

I can still do this using various gold, silver and distressed style hot blocking foils that I have, but my laser printer is a normal type of office printer and won't take mountboard. I you can lay you hands on an old HP Laserjet 2, they could handle amazingly thick card and if you can still get the toner cartridges for the the printers, you might be in business. All the internals for the Laserjet 2 were made by Cannon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_wJQXsGiiA

The Neilsen Bainbridge white core range of mountboard is not as thick as most 1.4mm mountboard , although it is sold as 1.4mm mountboard, they get around this by publishing a tolerance for the thickness and guess what it's always at the thinnest level of their spec. It's it also lower density than most other mountboards and has got quite good flexiblity and won't be a problem going through a Laserjet 2.

I don't know how it might work with other laser printers, but the Laserjet 2 is a very strong machine with very strong paper contact springs and the paper feed mechanism has a lot of guts, if you give it a little shuve to get it started on really thick card. I had one of these for years, they pre-date the invention of USB port, but you can get USB to Parallel port adapters for next to nothing, so it's no big deal anyway.

[prospero]

You could get some of the facing paper and print on that. There is a huge range available (or used to be) in big rolls.
Then drymount it to mountboard and cut out. You would have to take care in getting the register spot-on.

The mounts you see on Uni photos are stamped on with a heat activated foil. The expensive part would be making the tool
to stamp it. OK if you are doing 1000s but not for individual jobs.


Or you could learn calligraphy. Might be easier.

[Not your average framer]

Upto the size of paper that a colour inkjet printer will print on you can print whatever you what on the mount and also print lines to cut the edges of the mount and then cut the aperture of the mount using the cut edge to register the mountcutter settings against. I've done it, but instead of printing onto it I was dry mounting the fly leafs of old unwanted books to create authentic antique looking mounts for some very old water colour paintings.

To be honest, it was a lot of bother and the resulting laminated mountboard became quite a bit tougher to cut than had been expected. It did cut very cleanly, but there was a lot of resistance when pushing the blade through the mountboard, even though it was a brand new unused blade first class blade. I think you need to pick a different quality of paper to be sure that it will easier to cut.

I also have some very tough bookbinding paper called Elephanthide, which is a resign bonded paper containing very tough fibres. It is intended to be virtually indestructable and you cannot tear it by hand with starting a cut with a pair of scissors, because it's that tough. It is coloured to look like parchment and looks great dry mounted on to mountboard to give the mountboard an authentic parchment look.

Again it needs a new nice sharp blade and more effort that usually to cut the mount, but it looks great. I have not always found that dry mounting tisse is the best material for bonding the paper to the mountboard, as sometimes the bond seperates while cutting the mount. Istead I tend to roller the front face of the mountboard with woodworking (thick) PVA gllue and let it fully set before re-melt the PVA in the dry mounting press.