Jack Breen wrote:

> I read the article from Andy Taylor about Stencil Machines in MMDigest
> 971109 and believe I have one good option for him.  If he can find an
> old Epson MX100 or other printer with a wide carriage that takes
> continuous (fan-fold) paper, he has the first part of the problem
> licked.

The Panasonic KXP-1123 has a 12" paper path which will accept a piano
roll.  I wrote a QBasic program that allowed me to specify the exact step
location of the lyric in the Tonnesen perf file.  After unspooling the
roll, I would load the tail end of the roll into the printer, line up the
print head with the end of the last note, and print the lyrics on the
roll.  I will be happy to share this program with anyone who asks.

Frustration #1:  After 25 feet of music, the words were not in sync with
the music by 3".  I am not sure if this was due to the dry wax paper
slipping in the tractor feed mechanism, or if the rounding method for
converting 523 steps per foot to the printer's 1/72nd of an inch advance
were wrong.  A 3" creep moves the words from the tracker bar to the top
of the spool box.  Frustrating for personal use, unacceptable for
commercial sales.

Frustration #2: It takes a long time to print a roll.  I could probably
do 4-5 rolls per hour.  If you need to print lyrics on a shipment of 200
rolls from Custom Music Rolls, you are facing 40 hours of work.  It is
not just the printing of the roll.  You also have to unspool & re-spool
the roll.  Since the D-ring on the end tab will not fit through the
printer, you also get to trim the leader and glue end tabs on after
printing.  For someone doing this part time, it is extremely time
consuming.

Frustration #3:  The words are not sharp on the dry wax paper.  Plus,
they actually seem to "smudge" or "run" with time.

QRS has a great solution.  They stencil the lyrics on a roll in about 6
seconds.  Unfortunately, the machinery to do this is physically at least
25 feet long.

You could scale this down if you designed a system where you had two
spool boxes hinged to face each other like a book.  Spoolbox A would hold
the roll.  Spoolbox B would hold the stencil rolled up on a cardboard
tube.  There would be an inking device on the tracker bar in Spoolbox B,
you would have the inking device.

After getting the roll in place in spoolbox A and the stencil in place
in spoolbox B, you would close the spoolboxes so that their tracker bars
pressed against each other.  A transmission would drive both spoolboxes
simultaneously at a very fast tempo.  As the take-up spools progress, the
stencil in spoolbox B would allow ink to flow through on to the roll in
spoolbox A.  When you are done printing the lyrics, open the two
spoolboxes and rewind both the stencil and the roll so they are not in
contact.

You could probably crank up the speed so that you could print the lyrics
in about 1 minute per roll, and there would be no need to unspool,
respool, etc.  This would solve Frustrations #1 & #2 above.  You would
have to find some new kind of ink, as Bob Berkman at QRS once told me he
would love to use the same paper that Custom Music Rolls uses, but their
ink does not transfer to the dry wax paper well.

Bill Jelen
Akron, Ohio