Q Does anyone out there know where I can buy a water heater that will burn waste paper?
Nicholas Russell, via the forum at printweek.com

A This query came up following the article about energy saving in our recent Technology Report. Having done a bit of digging around, I suggest you have a look at TrashX Waste Incinerators. The range has been designed to burn industrial waste such as timber, cardboard and paper and the incinerators are available in various sizes, including a compact version with a capacity of 12.5kg of waste per hour, as well as a giant thing that will guzzle pallets. Most can apparently be fitted with warm air or water heaters. See www.trashxincinerators.co.uk tel: 01252 721555.

Picture perfect
Many thanks to John Watson OBE, chairman and chief executive of John Watson & Co in Glasgow, for this entertaining response to the ‘name that press’ challenge in Help Line, 28 May:

Re your query about the press in the picture, I am somewhat embarrassed to report that I used to operate one as a 14-year-old schoolboy at John Watson & Co, in Glasgow.

It is a tredle-operated, handfed Arab platen. We used it to overprint strength and contents information at the foot of pre-printed Scotch Whisky labels. This was in the bad old days of demarcation, where a compositor would set the overprint in type and pass it to a time-served journeyman letterpress printer

for makeready. It would then be printed by a female hand-feeder who on a good day could hit speeds of 1,200 per hour.
We took the tredle off and put a motor on as it was difficult to coordinate hands and feet, as you can imagine. We upgraded our small jobbing press to Heidelberg platens and at the height of our overprinting had 12 platens – today we are down to three.

The whisky labels were supplied by the Wace Group and Jarvis Porter, alas no longer. Nevertheless the opportunity was there and we now print in the region of 20m base labels a week for the drinks industry in general and the Scotch whisky industry in particular.

To help us do this we are operating various Speedmasters and two years ago took delivery of Heidelberg’s longest B2 sheetfed press, a nine-colour with pre-coat and double-coat facilities – a long way from our Arab platen, and all in one lifetime! Please hang on to your dog-eared copy of the Ipex catalogue, as I have my own.