Heat-sensitive printing machine

A heat-sensitive printing machine for pushing a hot printing plate against a heat-sensitive printing medium to print said printing medium with desired indicia, comprising:

• a printing head including a printing plate having a plurality of types bearing said desired indicia, and a heater for heating the types of said printing plate to a proper printing temperature;
• a reciprocal actuator for reciprocally bringing said printing head toward and away from a heat-sensitive printing medium to accordingly bring the types of said printing head into and out of contact with said heat-sensitive printing medium thereby to print said printing medium with the desired indicia of said types;
• elastic support means for said printing head interconnecting said reciprocating actuator and said printing head;
• said elastic means having a sufficiently small cross-sectional area to ensure that no more than about 20% of the heat in said printing head is conducted to said reciprocal actuator via said elastic means whereby the parallelism between the surfaces of the types of said printing plate and the surface of said printing medium can be ensured by the elasticity of said elastic means, and the loss of the heat, which will be transferred by conduction from said printing head through said elastic means to said reciprocal actuator, is kept small due to the small cross-sectional area of said elastic means thereby to maintain the types of said printing plate at said proper printing temperature with the accordingly reduced power consumption for compensating said heat loss;
• and
• said elastic means including a pair of leaf springs formed into a semi-circular shape and each having its one end connected to said printing head and its other end connected directly to said reciprocal actuator;
• the leaf springs in said pair being oriented so that the opening of said semicircular shape in each spring faces the opening of the other.