Project: Make New Punch Cards

To make punch cards, drums such as these were inked and rolled over cardstock. Then the stock was cut to size. Let's make some brand new punch cards. We here at The Gallery of Old Iron don't have any real card printing equipment, except some drums. So instead of stacking drums on a roller, feeding miles of cardstock, and making hundreds of cards per second, we'll just make a few by hand.

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Here is a picture of our setup: a card printing drum, cardstock, ink pad, and paper cutter.

After hand rolling, we have some card images. Finally we can read what this particular drum was used for: it made special purpose cards for employee time accounting. These cards would have been used with special payroll processing programs.

Next we hand cut the cards. Something tells us these particular cards would cause a reader jam rather quickly, as they are most defintely out of dimsional tolerance. They are also certainly out of tolerance as to column alignment. On the other hand, we don't have a reader to jam, and it was fun making the first new punch cards from this drum in 30 years or more!

Finally, here is a closeup of the finished product. Three brand new punch cards.