You’ll need:

• a printing base. The polymer plates we create aren’t type high by themselves. They need to be mounted on a base to make a type-high surface. We recommend our Boxcar Base system. Printers also use magnetic bases, or the dreaded wood base (wood bases cause all sorts of problems, by the way!)
• a press. Remember that most presses people purchase will not be ready to print beautifully right away. Be prepared to purchase new rollers or do other maintenance on your press!
• ink. we recommend Van Son rubber-based inks, which you can order in any uncoated Pantone number! Or you can purchase the Van Son base colors and mix your own colors. View the inks we carry.
• various pressroom supplies, including solvents, rags, printers furniture, quoins, and (if using a platen press) gauge pins.
• a fashionable printing apron

We now sell letterpress starter packs, which contain a lot of what you'll need to get started.

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Photopolymer plates offer an extremely detailed way to letterpress print with a deep heavy impression (or a kiss impression if you're so inclined). The chief problem that new photopolymer users encounter usually deals with roller height/roller condition. But no worries! Unlike larger problems like war or global warming, roller issues do have concrete and relatively easy solutions. We recommend rubber rollers and, if using a platen press, solid trucks. If switching from lead type/magnesium plates, you'll want to keep a much closer eye on your rollers. You may find our general printing FAQ's useful, especially if you'll be using a Boxcar Base.
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For starters, we recommend reading Gerald Lange’s book Printing Digital Type on the Flatbed Cylinder Press. Also take a look at printing FAQ's, which will be useful especially if you're using a Boxcar Base.

You may also want to check out PP Letterpress. This is an internet forum for discussing studio letterpress, the photopolymer plate process, and related investigative and exploratory printing and typographic techniques.

For preparing images, you might want to read Real World Scanning & Halftones, by David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman, Steve Roth, Conrad Chavez

We’re happy to answer any questions you have about how the Boxcar Base can help you print immaculately, as well as questions about our platemaking services. And we do everything we can to help our customers. If you’re not a customer, or if you have large in-depth questions—such as how to set up a letterpress shop—you might want to check out Briar Press or Five Roses web sites, both of which are great resources for letterpress printers.
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26 MB. If your file is larger than this, chances are that your images aren’t set up properly. Please double-check your images to make sure they’re in the correct color mode. If your files are meant to be that large, mail your files on a CD or Zip to: Platemaking Department; Boxcar Press; 501 W. Fayette St. #222; Syracuse, NY 13204
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Use the name of your company or your last name, and then the date. For instance, if you were Edith Wharton submitting InDesign files on June 1, 1908, we would suggest naming your file Wharton060108.indd. File names shouldn't have spaces, apostrophes, or non-alpha numeric character.

Also, make sure that all your files have a file extension, even if you're planning on stuffing or compressing your files.

file extensions
File type	extension
EPS	.eps
InDesign	.indd
PDF	.pdf
Illustrator	.ai
Pagemaker	.pm, .pm7, or .p65
Quark	.qxd
TIFF	.tif
PhotoShop (native)	.psd
Freehand	.fh or .fh8
Stuffit	.sit or .sitx
Zipped	.zip

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Make sure your file is prepared correctly (read more through our file prep tips). Make sure that all your files have a file extension. Then stuff or compress your files, including any typefaces or linked images that you use, into a single folder.
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This depends on the type of base you own. See the plate choices part of our web site for more information!

With polymer plates, you're mostly limited by your printing process and not by the plate material itself. That said, our plates are guaranteed to hold a 2 pt. Times New Roman type face.

It depends on the plate (though no hair lines, please!). If your plate has a 94 or 95 in the product name, we recommend at least a 0.2 point/.003" thickness (or larger). If your plate has 145 or 152 in the product name, we recommend at least a .35 point/.007" thickness (or larger).
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For the 94FL, KF95, KF152, and 152SB plates, the largest size plate we can process is 18 x 24. For all other plates, the largest size plate is 16 x 23.

Yes! Simply mail us your camera-ready art and we will scan it in for you. When possible, we love art work that’s on smooth, bright white paper or drafting vellum. Textured paper makes our job more difficult. We are faithful to originals: if you require modification or retouching, you may be charged for additional file preparation time at our shop rate of $60/hour. We’ll contact you before we bill for additional file prep. We can scan, in house, artwork up to 12 x 17 inches. We outsource scans for larger artwork (please contact us for pricing).
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Our favorite ways to receive files are by you sending us a press-ready PDF file (with fonts embedded) for platemaking and faxing in a hard copy for the proof. Our second favorite way is for you to send an EPS file for platemaking with a press-ready PDF for the proof. We also accept digital files in current versions of all major design programs (i.e. Quark, Pagemaker, Illustrator, InDesign, Freehand).

Note that we can’t make plates from Word and Publisher files – if you are designing in Word and Publisher, we recommend making a press-ready PDF with Adobe Acrobat and send that PDF to us. If you send us Word or Publisher files, we’ll need to typeset them in another graphic design program – we bill for this typesetting at $60/hour.

Also, remember Photoshop is great for images, but not suitable for creating text.
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Yes! By ganging up the plate yourself, you have more control over the margins and gaps between the ganged up artwork. Between each individual piece, we recommend .25” for plastic-backed plates and .5” for steel-backed plates. Our negatives come out of the imagesetter in 18" strips, so ganging up onto a 11.75" strip, up to 40" long, is the most economical way to make negatives. Since our maximum plate size is 18 x 23, please let us know where we can cut your negative if your file is longer than 23 inches.

That said, if you were to send us many individual files, we'd gang up the pieces in the most cost-effective manner. If you’re using plastic-backed plates, after we gang up your files, we’ll ship your job as a single plate and you can trim them simply yourself, using scissors or an Exacto. If you’re using steel-backed plates and we gang up your files for you, we’ll ship your job as a single plate, unless you provide a cutting diagram for us.
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The technical definition: a halftone is a matrix of different size dots which allow printers to simulate tonal variation when printing with a single ink on press. What this means: a halftone allows you, using one color ink, to approximate various shades of color. Take a magnifying glass and look at a black and white photo printed in your local newspaper. You’ll notice the image is actually made up of different size dots. The smaller the dot, the lighter the color in the halftone.
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The amount of dots in an inch of a halftone is determined by the LPI, also known as line screen. The higher the LPI, the more dots there are per inch. A higher LPI means the dots are smaller and less noticeable. Letterpress printers typically use between 85-133 LPI for their halftones.
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The ideal LPI depends on your paper and presswork, but most printers printing on uncoated paper use a 100 LPI. It’s a good balance of fine screen and easy printing. The higher the line screen, the more difficult it will be to print, because the high line-screen plate plugs up with ink in the shadows and looks murky over-all. Some printers prefer playing it safe and order 85 or 65 LPI. Using a lower LPI does make the dots coarser and more obvious. The finest line screen that we usually process is 133 LPI, although we would even question the use of 133 LPI, except on coated or hard papers. Our plates can hold detail to 200 LPI, but such a high line screen would be very difficult to print.

If you’d like a halftone for your image, you don’t adjust the LPI. Just tell us what LPI you’d like us to use, and we’ll take care of the rest. You will, however, adjust the DPI of the image before submitting your file to us. Your image’s DPI should be at least one and a half times the size of the LPI. For a 133 LPI image, for instance, make the image in the grayscale color mode with at least 200 DPI.

If you tell us the paper, the type of press you're using, and what you hope to accomplish with your halftone, we would be happy to recommend a line screen for you!
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DPI is Dots Per Inch. You adjust the DPI of an image in Photoshop: the DPI needs to be at least 1.5 times bigger than the LPI you tell us to make. You don’t set the LPI (Lines Per Inch). You tell us what LPI you want, and we’ll take care of the rest.
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For more information, read Real World Scanning & Halftones, by David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman, Steve Roth, Conrad Chavez.
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Most folks want clean line art, and if this is what you're seeking, scan at least at 600 DPI, though 1200 DPI is even better. Convert your file to the Bitmap mode via the 50% threshold method. We usually scan in grayscale, make adjustments to the image curves and levels, and convert the mode via Mode>Bitmap...>50% Threshold.

If you’d like a halftone, you can use a 300 DPI scan. With halftones, keep the image in the grayscale color mode in Photoshop, and let us know the LPI / line screen.

Either way, save your image as a TIFF with LZW compression.
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Check out Flight Check Collect, which will scan your file for any problems, and package all your images, fonts, and files.

Plastic-backed plates are simple to cut: you can use scissors or an Exacto. Steel-backed plates are not simple to cut. You’ll need tin snips, a metal shear, or a board shear. When we process plates, we can cut your steel-backed plates on our board shear. If you’d like us to trim your steel-backed plates, please include a cutting diagram with your order. Our cuts are accurate to within 1/16” of an inch. Keep your cutting diagrams simple, as we can only make straight cuts across the plates. Use a line with a magenta stroke to indicate cut lines on your file.
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No! Any plate that will be printed on a Boxcar Base will have Boxcar film adhesive applied free of charge.

If you’re not planning on reprinting your plates and want to treat them as disposable, then clean them with any normal press wash. Most solvents will not cause swelling or marring of the polymer surface. Do not use ethyl or methyl alcohol.

If you’d like your photopolymer plates to last indefinitely, you need to use the proper treatment and proper storage. Aggressive solvents that can clean lead type often dry out polymer plates, causing them to crack a few months later. Printers who want to keep their plates should consider a water-miscible solvent. The plate manufacturers recommend California Wash, which you can purchase from local printing supply stores like Xpedx.

The polymer is difficult to damage through scrubbing, but you should treat it like any typographic surface and not use too much abrasion when cleaning. Normal shop rags or synthetic printing cloths work well for cleaning the plate surface. If using plastic-backed plates, keep solvents away from plate edges so that the solvent doesn’t contact the film adhesive. If you find pleasure in dousing your plates with solvent, you may want to cover the edges of the plate with scotch tape to prevent solvent from leaking under the plate and damaging the film adhesive.
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Ideally, to preserve your plates for prosperity and posterity, you’ll want to store your plates in a constant humidity of 55%. In the very least, avoid extremely humid or extremely dry conditions. You can maintain a constant humidity by storing your plates in a ziplock bag. Keep your plates away from ultraviolet light that will crack your plate. At Boxcar Press, we store our plates in bags in a flat file. None of our plates have ever gone bad because of poor storage.
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We don’t recommend it. This would be like recommending you take a riding lawn mower to get from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin, which – while good fodder for a great movie by David Lynch (The Straight Story) – also caused a lot of grief, hair-raising scenes, and a little heartbreak. If you are determined to use wood, however—know that, even after your lengthy set-up time that will be required of you, you’ll still see uneven printing if using a wood base. Wood simply isn’t a flat enough surface to print on. If you’re going ahead with it anyway, use the 148SHSB, which is our most solid plate.
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