Scanning old mylar/vellum as-builts

Hi all,

I have a canon ipFA768 plotter with a Colortrac scanner on board. I've recently come across old as-builts that are getting pretty messed up and will probably have to look at scanning them in.

Does any know if scanning might damage the prints or the scanner themselves? I don't want to mess up the scanner (it cost a lot).

I may just take pictures of the as-builts, but that would be a long time and transferring over to the network...

Thanks for any help,

Does your scanner have an option for selecting the paper type on the source?

Any tears I try to use some tape on for real old stuff, we have a HP T2300, so far it has not damaged any ancient drawings, some of ours go back to 1927.

I have not used that scanner but I have scanned plenty of old sheets on various media. As long as they are in good physical condition, you should be good. For ragged sheets I tape the tears. If there are large or many pieces missing, I tape the entire sheet to another piece of paper the same size. The repairs prevent the sheet from getting jammed in the scanner.

OK. Thanks for the tips. One thing that concerns me is that all the as-builts are in our "hanging file". So they have a label "carrier strip" that we use to hang on the hanging files. This is what concerns me as well as the older tears/rips.

I was thinking I could cut the strips off, but that's very time consuming.

Thx,

Unfortunately, scanning a bunch of drawings is time consuming.

Those strips will probably have to be removed.

Have you compared the cost of doing the scans in-house to having them sent out to your local reprographics shop? Your time is worth something unless this happens to be a slow period for you.

It's kind of slow for me (winter usually is). I'm sure when March comes in, it'll start to pick up again. I'm doing this (cuz it needs to get done) and just to get these 30 year old hard copy's archived! They've been sittin' around for a couple of decades' now!

I agree with Rob, the strips would have to be removed IMO.

Depending on sheet size but for a A1 841x594mm 36x24 use 200dpi dont go higher, you will find the quality is good when reprinting higher dpi only makes larger files with little or no benefit. For a A3 use 300dpi at least maybe 400 in our case the A3 is a 1/2 size A1 so text can be small. Basicly pick a real bad one and a good one and play with dpi. I appreciate these days data storage is not a problem. Depending on scanner scan time may increase.

Ps we scan every single document, letters, emails, plans, the quantity would be mind boggling, we also have a department that its there job.

I disagree with that, BIGAL. The size of the original shouldn't determine the resolution.. It really comes down to what you are scanning and what you are using the scan for. For any drawing, 200dpi should be the minimum. If there is any chance that they will be used to generate CAD drawings, a higher setting might be in order.