Word of the day: dandy roll

In today’s Zippy, Dandyroll Washbasin looks at a steel-belted radial: “Hmm . . . ‘tired’ can mean having steel-belted radials, or getting ready for bed!”

Like a washbasin, a dandy roll is a thing:

a light wire-covered roll that rides on the wet web of paper on a fourdrinier machine to compact the sheet and sometimes impress a watermark.

A fourdrinier is a thing:

a paper machine in which the web of paper is formed on an endless traveling wire screen that passes under a dandy roll, over suction boxes, through presses, and over dryers to the calenders and reels.

A calender is a thing:

a machine for calendering cloth, rubber, or paper by passing it between rollers or plates

To calender is

to press (as cloth, rubber, paper) between rollers or plates in order to make smooth and glossy or glazed or to thin into sheets.

No etymology for dandy roll in the OED or Webster’s Third. The fourdrinier was named for Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, nineteenth-century British papermakers and inventors. Calender comes from the Greek κύλινδρος, “cylinder.” The name Dandyroll Washbasin comes from Bill Griffith’s imagination and knowledge of papermaking.

The Johnston Dandy Company has a website full of dandy rolls and other mighty paper-making machines.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Definitions from Webster’s Third.]