Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
The punch isn't much good unless you have a precisely matching pin bar or pin glass,
or preferably a set of them. Some of the later punches had adjustable spacing. I've
passed up any number of these deals. I've got an immaculate new diagonal punch right now that I still have to mfg the matching components for. Might not ever get around to it. Still have other sets in good working order. It's a lot easier to get gear for really big film sizes, which were formerly used in conjunction with graphics copy cameras. Extremely small differences in pin spacing can spoil registration. Condit used
micropins which had the tiny 1/16" inch pin slightly off-center from the 1/8" base, so
that they could be every so slightly rotated for exact adjustment, before the expoxy
set. Still, if one was smart, they ordered spare pin glasses or bars up front, along with
the original punch. Condit kept punched mylar strips of everything they made; but post
ordering wasn't always completely sucessful. The biggest problem right now is finding
any kind of thick anti-newton glass which can be successfully drilled without chipping.
I've acquired a number of small diamond bits and lubricants to test, but am not terribly
optimistic. I did find an alternate way of doing it, without resorting to pins outside the
glass itself, which will either crop some of the image or necessitate taping a supplemental registration strip (easy to do, but one more potential source of misregister if multiple masks have to be generated).
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