Adhesive bonding and miscellaneous chemical manufacture – Methods – Surface bonding and/or assembly therefor
Patent
1997-06-05
1999-12-21
Mayes, Curtis
Adhesive bonding and miscellaneous chemical manufacture
Methods
Surface bonding and/or assembly therefor
156 63, 156263, 156277, 156299, 156300, 1563041, 83 32, 428 58, 40624, 270 101, 101483, 101485, B32B 3100, G09F 1502
Patent
active
060044217
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to creating large printed images using a relatively small printing press.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
While there are many uses for large printed images, especially for advertising, there are no satisfactory and inexpensive methods for accurately producing them without a special purpose printing press which is generally expensive.
One method used for printing large images, is to use a specialized printing press capable of handling large sheets of paper. The image is divided up into parts, each as large as the press can handle, or the entire image is printed on one sheet. Generally a press which can handle media having a width equal to the width of the final image is used so that matching need be done in only one direction. The different parts of the image are then printed and the image is created by accurately manually cutting or matching each page along premarked lines and then assembling the parts together manually.
There are several shortcomings to using this method. First, a large special purpose printing press, capable of handling large sheets of printing media must be used. Second, the media must be accurately cut and fitted together manually in order to create the very large sizes of printed images. The reason manual cutting and fitting is needed is that most printing methods leave an unprinted margin around the printed portion of the media. The width of the unprinted margin and the exact placement of the image is unknown before the actual printing.
Another method that can be used to print large images is to use a regular printing press, and then fit together a very large number of small pieces which are cut from the printed images which make up a large image. This method is uneconomical owing to the large amount of work needed to register, cut and paste the pieces together, and the resulting large image is seldom satisfactory.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention seeks to solve the above mentioned problems. The process of the invention requires a printing press capable of printing on sheets much smaller than the final large image and does not require a large amount of manual labor in order to assemble the final image.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, a large image is divided into sub-images each of which is smaller than the size of an image that a digital printing press can print. Segments of the large image are printed so that each printed segment is larger than the size of the sub-images and each segment contains a printed border which duplicates the image printed on adjacent segments by a known and constant amount. It should be noted that each printed image segment incorporates one sub-image but is larger than the dimensions of the sub-images which make up the final large image.
The image segments are printed, preferably sequentially and a set of sheets of media containing all the image segments is stacked and cut accurately to the size of the sub-images into which the large image was divided. So long as the position of each segment on the sheet of media is the same (e.g., the margins are repeatable from segment to segment), it is not necessary to accurately position any of the individual segments when they are cut, or even to accurately position the cuts with respect to any edge. All that is required is that all of the media containing the segments be accurately cut at the same distance from the margins to the exact size of the sub-images. Die cutting is especially suitable for cutting the sub-images from the sheets of media. When these cut sub-images are butted together they create the desired image with no overlap or mismatches.
In a digital printing press, such as the E-Print.TM. 1000 series of digital printers manufactured and distributed by Indigo, N.V. of Holland, the position of the image for sequential images can be can be held constant to a high degree of accuracy with respect to the edges of the media. Generally, printing systems using plates, which are replaced between images, do not yield images positio
Gray Linda L.
Indigo N.V.
Mayes Curtis
LandOfFree
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