Polychrome acquires Cellofilm

Polychrome acquires Cellofilm     By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

In 1961, we also acquired the Cellofilm Co., located in Woodridge, NJ. The sales manager of Cellofilm, Stanley Eysmann, was appointed President. His father had started Cellofilm in the 1920s to remove the silver from used photographic film. We had bought the reels of the nitrocellulose from which the silver had been removed for the stencil coating solutions and most users preferred to buy it dissolved. One of the biggest customers used it to make plastic wood. It was also used in nail polish. Cellofilm also received rent for storing rolls of news film in brick vaults. In 1965, a plant to make the nitrocellulose solutions was established in Chicago a few miles from Midway to make these solutions. Later, Cellofilm obtained the exclusive rights to import nitrocellulose from Europe. Unfortunately, during a shut-down when the clean-up crew was sweeping the floor they did not wet it with water as instructed and there was a fire and several workers were critically injured.

Polychrome acquires Chromatone

Polychrome acquires    Chromatone          By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

The first company Polychrome acquired was a small manufacturer of printing ink, Chromatone. It was owned by Irving Simmons and was located in a loft in lower Manhattan. In a few years this was relocated to Lodi, NJ. We also started an ink making plant in San Francisco. In 1961, we bought the American Printing Co. in Cincinnati, OH, from the Young brothers. Irving Simmons was appointed Vice President in charge of the ink division.      

Presensitized Printing plate 10

Polychrome acquires        by Mr. Bob Gumbinner

Speidel

About 1965 we bought a company, Speidel, in Fernwood, PA, which made diazo papers. It was also one of the few companies still making blueprint and brown print paper. Andy Keene was the vice president and sales manager. We elected to the Polychrome Board two of the directors of Spiedel -- General La Brum and Bruce Baldwin.     We put a number of people in charge of Speidel among them were Nick Karabotz, who was in charge of our Philadelphia sales office, Ray Townley and Pat Heany who came from Ilford. When we moved the offset paper coating operation to Speidel, we put Ray Lauzon in charge. With the increasing popularity of he Xerox electrostatic process the market for diazo paper was decreasing. Therefore, when the plant workers asked for a large wage increase and went on strike, we sold the Fernwood plant in 1976.

KS note;   Speidel played a significant role in 1967.     We needed a solvent coater to coat newly developed subtractive positive plate,      Speidel was the only place to have a solvent coater; it was designed for a diazo film coating and the local engineers were quite worried whether it could handle much heavier aluminum roll.         I believe Mr. Gumbinner prevailed and we were able to coat enough plates for our 1968 Drupa exhibit, which from all accounts was a great success.
See more on positive plate introduction HERE.

Presensitized Printing plate 9

Presensitized Printing plate 9　　　　　　By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

In the area where the stencil finishing operations had been I worked with Century Engineering on the design of a line to make two sided presensitized plates. This line had a slurry brushing section with six top brushes and six brushes to slurry brush the bottom side. The aluminum web could either go through this section or go above it through an alkaline etch, rinse desmut and rinse tanks. From either line the aluminum passed around a copper roll and into a sulfuric acid anodizing bath. This time we used aluminum cathodes. If we wanted one sided grained plates, provision was made to install a rubber blanket in the anodizing tank which protected the bottom side from being anodized. The web then went into the coating rooms which had two coating sections and drying tunnels. From there it was cut into sheets with a black polyethylene protective paper. As noted above before this line was operational we installed two meniscus coaters. At some point we bought and installed a Fuller Brush slurry graining machine to supply rolls of grained aluminum to these coaters. I know this Fuller machine was installed in a building near the railroad tracks. We may have bought the building next door, which had been used to store post office trucks and put the building in back of that. We later bought the next building which had been owned by a flour distributor. The purchasing and drafting departments were put in the offices on the second floor of this building.

Presensitized Printing plate 8

Presensitized Printing plate 8           By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

While the slurry brush plates which used the zirconium fluoride interlayer performed well in the print shops, under humid conditions the chemically etched plates sometimes failed to hold the image. We called this walk off. 3M offered us a license to use the silicate interlayer for a 12% royalty. For a few months we made some of these which we called Lithocoat to distinguish them from the zirconium fluoride interlayer plates and send them to customers who had complained of walk off. Ray Lauzon kept track of the production of these. At that time, Simon Chu discovered that if, after the diazo sensitizer had been coated on the zirconium interlayer plates, they were overcoated with Uvinul MS-40, 2 hydroxy-4 methoxy benzophenone 5 sulfonic acid, the diazo was no longer water soluble and walk off no longer occurred. To give further insurance against humid conditions, a less water soluble Uvinul D-50, tetrahydroxy benzophenione, was coated on top. We quickly added two more squeeze roll costing stations to the diazo coaters to make the plates with these protective coatings. I do not believe we paid 3M royalties for the few plates we made between accepting the license and the production of the MS-40 coated plates.