Pictures & Penny Dreadfuls

The elder young'n came by a couple weeks back to give Cid her birthday present – a nice Nikon digital camera with the usual accouterments – and used his own new camera to take a picture of me out in the print shop.
     Last weekend he stopped by on the way to Grandma's birthday dinner at a local franchise eatery & showed me a picture that he had plonked on his flickr.com account. Nice picture of the old guy. (There are actually three pictures, one of me grinning insanely and a more staid shot, shown here edited to lighten it up some, and another of me going through the type cases.)
     I was struck, upon going to the site & looking for his other stuff, that he had taken his grandfather's name as the account name.

You spend your life thinking that someone's gonna remember you. You watch other folks like yourself come to knowledge and then die off, forgotten. Some who came before and some who are of your time, they show up as records in books mostly but for the most part their names are long forgotten by the time the grandkids die off.
     Upon the death of my father, I took a certain attitude toward making sure the old guy was remembered at least a bit for what he'd done on this earth. I remembered and wrote about his drinking. I remembered his harsh, military-style discipline, how he was insanely obsessed with the driveway being shoveled off spotlessly, down to the tarmac with even the frozen tracks of the first pass out of the driveway removed. Measuring the length of the grass in the yard and showing me where I'd missed this or that pass in what was really a pretty ratty grass back yard.
     I remembered his sitting on the front porch with me in Indianapolis, looking at the clear evening sky and the full moon that illuminated the earth to cast moon shadows against the steps and front door. I remember saying that I wondered what the first man might have said upon seeing the moon for the first time. And I remembered his response.
     "What did you think the first time you saw the moon?"
     A man of bizarre perspectives, my father.
     Just like my sons.
     At which point it makes perfect sense that my father's name should be remembered by my son upon setting up a flickr.com account.
     Keeping the name and the old man alive, just like the shot he posted of me in the shop, looking half erudite and half civil, a weaker moment.

At the same time I have to wonder how it was that my most recent offering to the Amalgamated Printers' Association might not have made the recent bundle, names and misspellings and bad register and all considered.
     Maybe it was too risqué? Maybe it was too violent?
     Why it no show up, yo?
     
See, the purpose of literature, the purpose of text on paper, is the preservation of ideas, no matter how bizarre. The balance is in discerning that the instruction manual for a piece of ancient shipboard radio gear, despite its age, is as relevant as the last page of a John Rechy novel or an essay by William Burroughs on the control of various levels of the soul in Egyptian mythology.
     So what was in the piece that didn't get bundled?
     Well, let's see . . .
     "The hole in the front of his head where the bullet went in was about the size of a pencil." An admitted direct squirrel of a perfectly good William Burroughs line?
     Something about a wop in the rock letting out water that had been blessed by the last chink . . . a turn of words that I just played with 'cause they was there, thems?
     The slipping back and forth between an omniscient narrator and a first person narrator whose sexuality was never quite decided?
     Or maybe it was the fact that someone gets shot over and over across two pages as part of a loop in time into which the antagonist and antihero have been dragged by cosmic forces as yet unexplained.
     Or was it the description of the antagonist as a "bleached turd," among other nasty names & appellatives?
     Who knows?
     I don't.

All I know is that my son took a photo of me and put it on the web under an account name that is my father's name and the very things that my father did in his printery – the writing of interesting things with the words being used and shifted about in an interesting way – is pretty much what I do today.
     Thus is my father remembered.
     Thus as we are today.
     And if it turns out that the mailer thought my submitted penny dreadful was inappropriate for the bundle, I guess I'll have to get 'em all back, all 170-odd copies. Then it'll be my privilege to send 'em out individually to whoever wants 'em. One at a time. Just like the way things used to be back when penny dreadfuls were so common and so dreadful, just like in my father's day.

Restoration Almost Complete, Part II

I mentioned earlier about the treadle I'd gotten for the 9x13 George P. Gordon press that I've been resurrecting to use. Well, one of the reasons that the treadle was kicking my butt involved two motions & the frictional constant. The range of motion problem begins with having adapted a treadle meant for a C&P to use on a related but not necessarily similar machine. The treadle was hosed up to the Gordon by the backmost piece of hardware on the frame of the press. Worked fine, 'cept for one thing.
     The hinge point on the Gordon is about an inch in diameter. The face of the clamp that holds the treadle on the press is machined for a piece of metal about a quarter inch larger. Thus there was side-to-side play and a wobble to the movement of the treadle under foot.
     This bothered me because, most importantly, I didn't want to wear down the post with the treadle's movement. And I realized that the side & end play of the treadle was part of my troubles, in that keeping a foot on a treadle that's flopping around is not too much different from trying to catch a bullet in the dark with a pair of pliers.
     The remedy for both situations was simple: a bearing surface to reduce friction, with the bearing material itself set to fit the diameter of the hinge point and to reduce the friction & wear on the steel-to-iron surface of the treadle's hinge point. I did this by simply buying scintillated bronze bearings of the appropriate inside diameter and putting them at the bearing face. I had to cut the bearings in half – which weren't no biggy – and wrap them around the shaft while putting the hinge sections back together.
     But, oh, what a difference that made.
     First, the flopping about ended. The treadle had only one component of movement, which component was the point of the whole thing from the beginning: up and down movement under the empowering foot.
     And the friction was reduced, thus giving a smoother and easier feel under foot to the leg involved in the pumping.
     It was special.
     I was happy.
     And I could now concentrate on the other two matters that concerned me from the beginning of this project: the roller arm spring bearing faces and the play in the platen lifter upon the press opening after the impression.

The roller arm springs are large. The a stubbed up against a rectangular piece of metal that bears against the sides of the roller arm through which the roller arm shaft & hook glide. One side appears to be excessively warn, in that in the movement up to, across and back down from the ink disk, the spring & shaft slips inside the arm such that there is an audible click when the rollers come off the ink disk and back onto the roller bearers on the bed.
     Such things bother me.
     First the wear cannot be doing any good to the space through which the spring and shaft move. Secondly it's another shift inside the mechanism that must certainly change the way that part of the mechanism works.
     And I don't like the click.
     So I now have to make or have made a copy of the rectangular piece so that it slides inside track but doesn't flop around in it. And that's the easiest one.

One of the improvements that Chandler & Price threw into their assuming of the original Gordon press patents was to strengthen the raceway of the platen rocker mechanism inside the so-called "bull gear." That's the large gear on the right side of the press (facing the ink disk or bed). The mod that C&P made is shown on page five of their brochure for their presses, showing
This is, of course, part of the advance of technology to which the Gordon factory of the 1870s did not have access. Thus the raceway of the gear wheel of the George P. Gordon "New Series" presses is a simple machined groove. At the point where C&P put the hardened steel insert, there is only cast metal & and a machined raceway.
     The absence of this extra metal means that there is wear in the raceway of the Gordon over time. And this is the condition of this press.
     The remedy for this problem is not simple.
     I can either have someone weld in reinforcements on the outside of the raceway or, in addition to the reinforcement, add a track of modern steel. If I add the track, I must manually assure beforehand that the cam raceway remains the same spacing, which is a lot of touch-and-go, file-and-test operation.
     But it's gotta be done.
     At some point, if I don't work this out, the raceway will fail and the movement of the press – under the momentum of the flywheel – will rip through the outside of the raceway in the gear and destroy that part of the press, a part which is singularly important in its doing the job it does.

I can run the press without any of these fixes, but I'd rather not. The continued use of the worn roller spring shaft end isn't a biggy. The press might run another fifty or hundred years, properly lubed and carefully tended, without having the piece fixed.
     The gear cam raceway is a bit more bothersome to me. There's only about half and inch at the most in metal between running and destruction. The present raceway shows signs of wear that lead me to believe that, if not already imminent, the failure of that raceway is in the long run very possible.
     If I want to keep the press going, especially after all the work and money that I've put into it, I will have to take care of the last problem at the very least. And in as much as I can't get the cam gear off the shaft without some superhuman effort, the fix for that one is going to be a long, drawn-out, cumbersome and expensive process.
     Gotta be done, though.
 

Double-Time It, Soldier!

Ok, so I get the George P. Gordon 9x13 up and running, new rollers and a treadle and lock some type up in the chase & turn to with the treadlin' and the printin'. Worked out pretty well, all thought up and everything. And I discovered in the process that I'd been dead wrong all this time about the rotational direction of the flywheel.
          I'd thought that the flywheel turned toward the printer from the top when, in fact, it turns the same direction as the flywheel on the C&P: toward the back of the press from the top. I figured this out because the way the press opened after impression was just a little too abrupt. It was so abrupt that the press would actually thump and the platen would seem to fly back with considerable force.
     When I looked at the cam race for the lever that lifts the platen from open to closed, I realized that it had a very quick action going forward, that is, toward impression when the flywheel rotated toward the rear. Running the flywheel backwards put that abrupt lift into an abrupt opening, which I don't think it was ever intended to be. That and the fact that it is the same cam raceway, as contours go, as the C&P convinced me that I'd been runnin' the press backwards all along.
     But there were other issues more pressing, at least to me.
     First off, I was standing there thinking that, when I had the Pearl, it seemed such a delight to run, so easy to peddle up and down, a breeze. It just seemed that I was burning a lot of energy getting the Gordon running. It was also getting me winded.
     I printed a stack of 50 sheets and took a break to put 'em on the drying shelf and then went back to the press, starting up and running another 50. By that time I'd decided to shift from my left to my right leg to treadle and even halfway through that second stack of 50 sheets my right leg was wearing out.
     I finished that stack of 50, put them on the drying shelf and got a drink of water. Then I went back to the press and did the next 50 with my left leg and the last 50 with my left starting and my right finishing the stack.
     After I put the last stack on the rack I looked at the press and thought there had to be a better way. That or I was obviously a lot older now than I was when I had the Pearl in the shop and even older from when I had the Gordon hooked up to a 2x4 treadle, some 20-odd years further back in time.
     I was further reminded of this age factor – and by the possibility that I was out of shape worse than I thought – when I ran the press a few ten or so impressions to clean it up. That being done – and I might add that it's nice to be able to lean over and clean a press from the front instead of from the sides – I took another break, had another drink of water, cleaned up some of the shop area and considered again what it was taking me to print 200 copies.
     A little math later the next day got me the answer: To print 200 copies of anything was taking a little over half a mile.

Mathematically it makes perfect sense. Mathematically, if you figure that there are five turns of the flywheel to take one impression, it would take five stomps on the treadle to keep the flywheel moving around long enough to make the impression. And counting off on only one foot, it's something like 400 steps to cover a quarter mile.
     Two hundred copies takes one thousand stomps, which means that if 400 stomps on one leg is a quarter mile, a thousand stomps is a bit over a half mile. So a press run of 200, including inking up and cleaning off, plus a few throw-aways along the way, comes easily to over a half mile.
     Five stomps on the treadle for five rotations of the flywheel for one impression, well, it's easy to see where the getting tired was coming from.
     At which point I went in the house & got out the old BB&S catalog that Dad left behind. That and a 1923 ATF catalog too. And inside each of those tomes is a run-down on the various statistics of the C&P and Golding Pearl presses. And I have PDFs of the booklets on them and the Golding presses too.
     Turns out a 7x11 Pearl does one impression every three stomps on the treadle.
     Three stomps on the Pearl versus five stomps on the Gordon.
     It's no wonder the Pearl was a slick press to run.
     Hell, I'm working almost twice as much, stomp-wise, on the Gordon as on the Pearl! That's like printing at a leisurely walk with the Pearl and hustling it double-time, soldier, on the Gordon!

Shit! I should never have given away that Pearl! What a moron!

I am left with only a few recourses, other than going all the way across the Mississippi to get a reconditioned Pearl – one what's been cleaned up so it'll look good in a studio. All of the recourses cost money and time and some self-denunciation. All of 'em involve finding a way to squeeze one more press into a space already overcrowded with two large presses & a table-top side-lever press, other equipment, shelves, storage, typecases, tools, bits and a printshop cat. And none of the ways of getting that done – not a single stinkin' one of 'em – will pass muster with Cindy.
     My choices?
     Put a motor on the Gordon.
     Not what I had in mind, seein' as how I spent on the treadle already more 'n I'd spend on a motor by any stretch. Yeah, sure: I could do it. It'd be easy. But it's the principle of the thing, yo. I wanted to treadle a press.
     Or get a Pearl, which would involve a lot more than just finding one for which I'd have to pay real money. Somehow moving the Gordon or finding it a home somewheres else. And the carping and weedling I'd hear from Cindy? Don't even think about it.
     That's my choices. Them two choices alone all by they's lonesome.
     Off stage I can hear my father grumbling. "I hope you jezebels are happy now! I told you this was gonna happen!"

There is only one other way that I can fix this problem – if you want to consider working twice as hard with one press over another I used to have as being a problem – is to take it on the chin, tough it out and settle for the fact that I'm gonna have to work slower or take more frequent breaks. And hope that my ability to run the press, my stamina, if you must, will improve over time with practice.
     As if.
     See, I have this very visual memory thing going on here: I remember my father sitting in his chair in the living room, cigarette in his hand, that dour look of desperation in old age, begging me to take his print shop, 12x18 C&P, granite stone, cases of old and new type, table-top paper cutter & all. Begging me 'cause he couldn't barely get out of the chair, let alone go down the steps to the basement and into his printery, as he had for decades for one reason or the other. And me saying I couldn't; didn't have room for it; what would I do with it?
     That alone is enough to make me take it on the chin. That look of desperation and age from half a decade at least of serious immobilizing inactivity stopping him cold like a broken crutch. Makes a thousand stomps for 200 copies seem pretty easy, even if I eventually do have to revert or resort to the electric motor.
 

Restoration Almost Complete, Part I

One of the happy coincidences of my life has been the good fortune to run into folks who have or do stuff that I need, usually pretty close up to when or where I need it. Rehabilitating presses, once a pleasurable experience but now a pretty nasty chore, what with shaking hands and all, well, that's one of those things you gotta know where and who about. My recent recovery of a 1870s-vintage platen press and my adventures with getting it back together & running has been reasonably calming, but there are parts of it I'm still working on.
     First big project was rollers. That was solved by my luck of finding out about Ramco Roller Products in San Dimas, CA. Re-rollered the press for less than $200. Damn sight cheaper than the worst-case estimate of almost $600.
     Second project, and probably as important as the first, was getting a means of moving the press. Like how it runs moving the press, as opposed to moving the press. I could have gone with a half-dead washing machine motor on the floor behind the press and a V-belt over the flywheel. But I didn't.
     I went for the human power system: a treadle.
     Now I'd done this before with this beater, clamping a 2x4 under the press to the back rod upon which the bed pivots, and it had worked out pretty well, even with the aluminum connecting strap getting hot and smelling nasty after an hour or so of pumping. So it wasn't like I hadn't been there. It was more like I wanted to put something on the press a little more appropriate than an oily 2x4 & some aluminum strap.
     Which brought me to find Hern Iron Works with a web page about their recast of treadles for C&P press and Pearls. And a price list.
     After conferring with Joel at Hern Iron Works, I figured out that I needed a #0219 treadle, which would run me about $185, shipping included. That was easy enough, I figured, so I wrote 'em a check and put it in the mail.
     A couple weeks later the treadle arrived in a wood box & with a profound "thump" on the front porch. I dragged the box inside and out to the garage. I pry-barred the box open and extracted the cast iron treadle and its connecting hook. I used the hardware provided to lash it to the bar at the rear of the press that holds two sides together, hosed up the hook and gave the flywheel a shove.
     Right up front I knew I was in for some work. It was all I could do to keep the press up to a reasonable speed. The reason, of course was pretty obvious.
     Like all good things cast of iron, the need for smooth bearing surfaces is critical. But like all good things designed for one use and yet pushed into another, I had to get out the grinder and attempt to smooth the surface on the inside of the hook where it lopped over the crankshaft upon which were mounted the flywheel and the pinion gear. I knew this going in, since someone elsewhere on the InterWebs, whose writing probably clued me in to Hern, had mentioned that the connecting hook was a bit rough.
     It was. But it's also a piece of cast iron.
     Thus the grinder.
     What I ended up doing was using a grinding wheel that my father had bought decades ago to sharpen lawnmower blades. It was exactly the diameter of the area of the crankshaft and thus perfect for smoothing out the rough edges of the bearing face. Took me about an hour to get things more or less right.
     If I'd had a drill press and some clamps, I could have made the surface plain and smooth both. As it was, I knew that my "polishing job" was going to result in a bearing face that was less than even across it's width. But it was close enough.
     And the press was a lot easier to pump too.
     So score one: Hern Iron Works had helped me restore the Gordon to a more appropriate motive source. And yes, that's a plug.

The next big deal was getting the gripper bar mechanism to play so the grippers wouldn't get entangled behind the rollers as the press opens. This is what damaged the still-unrepaired lower most right hand roller hook, which led to the damaging of one roller stock, which required me hacking one together out of 7/16 steel bar stock.
     On your common C&P, the grippers don't open until the lowest roller has cleared the top of the chase. That way they're not in the way to catch anything coming at 'em from wherever. On the Gordon such a feature would be nice, except that the platen is not rocking toward or away from the plate on closing or opening. The platen on the Gordon is hinged at the bottom, much like Pearl or Pilot, which means that the gripper pivot point is not moving below the midline of the chase when the press closes or opens. In fact, the pivot point for the grippers is below the pivot of the platen, which makes the mechanics of closing & opening the grippers a bit more complex.
     In the long-back, when the Gordon was in my shop first, I remember once having to stop the press rather quickly because the grippers did indeed get stuck behind the rollers.
     I determined that a piece of metal bolted to a brass arm, which was supposed to form a cam race for the gripper bar pivot, had broken. I fixed that by adding more metal & screwing things back together. I got things more or less working and went on with printing. A while after I gave the press to Tom Ebbert, he told me that the gripper bar spring had broken and that the grippers had caught the lowest roller & bent the hook on the right arm. Must have been a helluva force. I still haven't straightened out the hook. In fact, I may have to get one made.
     Either way, between my experience and Tom's, I wanted the grippers to behave a bit more like those on a C&P, in as much as I was going to have to repair so much stuff. Thus I worked out a mental image of what the gripper bar cam should do as the press cycled. And it wasn't just a simple pulling of the grippers against the platen. It was a bit more complicated than that.
     See, with the pivot of the platen at the bottom of the platen but with the gripper bar pivot below that, if I set a straight line race for the cam to follow, the grippers would be smashed against the platen such that they would get bent away from the platen and would then be smashed toward the chase & bed. This would put them directly in the path of the downward motion of the rollers. I had to make the cam race bent and curved so as to allow the grippers to remain flat against the platen and only in line with the platen surface during impression.
     In other words, the gripper cam had to follow a curved line that went back and behind where it had been as the platen closed.
     After hours of fiddling with aluminum stock and brass stock, I got close enough to where I thought I knew what I was doing.
     I dragged out a chunk of steel stock, bent it around to nearly match the brass piece that I'd ended up with, and then drilled some holes in it for mounting. That accomplished, I tried it out. It worked perfectly the first time. Not that it was perfect.
     I still need to put a small lift in the horizontal plane of the race so it closes the grippers against the platen even earlier than it does now. That will get the grippers out of the way of the rollers for a longer time. But I can't make them close too quickly or they'll be closed before the stock is completely fed – or closed too long after the press opens to safely extract the printed piece.
     Maybe I'll just leave it as it is and be happy.

So now it's time to get out the works and fire this beast up good. I've got a 200 copy run, two sides, for a page for the 2008 edition of Treasure Gems. This being the 50th anniversary of the Amalgamated Printers' Association, I figure I ought to put something in from this shop too. Even if it is about the saxophone collection.
 

Good Source for Good Rollers

One of the most costly parts of having letterpress equipment is the need for a good set of rollers for the press. You can have all the fancy-pants ink & paper that you want but if you're running busted up rollers, no make-ready in the world is going to save your work from lookin' cheap. You gotta have good rollers, well adjusted & not overly down on the type, to print solid colors. And if you're into text in large chunks, a pitted set of old rollers, hard and nasty lookin', will show up as fades and over-inking.
     Getting good rollers without going broke is hard task. For a 10x15 C&P, a set of three rollers runs between $220 and $500 in old-school composition and between $340 and $700 in appropriate duro rubber. Vinyl is only slightly cheaper but not always.
     There are probably many small, local shops that might be able to fix up rollers for printers, but it's not like they advertise a lot. And among printers the word of such places gets passed around slowly.

So one day I'm cruisin' the web looking at websites & blog pages of other letterpress shops (and studios). One of 'em, Joie Studio, had a blog, wherein the proprietess, Tina, wrote about her setting up her printshop – er, studio. One entry was about her having found a source of roller rehabilitation in her own neighborhood, a place called Ramco Roller Products. Out in San Dimas, California. Run by a fellow Tina identified as Adrian.
     I went through the usual search on the InterWebs for the place recommended and, upon finding an email address, I sent off a query to Adrian on getting rollers for the Gordon done up.
     Now prior to this I'd done business on three occasions that I remember with Brown Regrinding. I'd gotten new rubber rollers for the 10x15 for about $200. A set of brand new rollers for a rehabilitated 7x11 Pearl Improved cost me about $180. I was impressed with the rollers I got back for the two presses. I still have the 10x15 running and I've had absolutely no problems with those rollers for over eight years now.
     Then Brown Regrinding went out of business.
     A bunch of folks in the letterpress game noticed the closing and many bemoaned the end of access to a reliable, quality source for economical rubber roller services. Of course the word of this closing got around eventually to those needing or wanting the kind of service that Brown Regrinding had provided. If the company had been "on the web" the news of the closing might have gotten around quicker.
     It works like that any more: you gotta have a web presence.

A day after I'd sent off my query I got an email back from Adrian Ramos, who runs the shop. Adrian gave a bit of background on his company, mentioning that the company had been making rollers for printers for 25 years. He said that the rollers for the Gordon, based on the meager information I'd given him, would cost $55 each.
     I put the rollers – two with compo on 'em and one a home-brew stock made of 7/16 steel bar stock – in a box and sent 'em off to Adrian.
     A couple days later, I got an email from Adrian saying that he'd received the stocks and that they'd been finished very quickly. He also mentioned that I'd estimated the cost of shipping a bit too high and that he'd be sending me a check for the overage.
     A couple days later a check arrived; within the week the rollers were on my front porch, delivered by one of two friendly & often-seen UPS delivery guys.

I am known as a pretty cynical, mean old curmudgeonly gringo. I agree most of the time with that assessment. But there's something about even-handed, fair & honest workmanship that I find impossible to dismiss. When I see timely and careful attention to quality or excellence, I am very deeply impressed.
     The rollers I got back from Ramco Roller Products are every bit the quality of what printers used to see from Brown Regrinding.
     I'm amazed that the folks I know in letterpress printing don't know about Ramco. You'd think, what with the so-called letterpress revival & and the space it's taken up on the InterWebs, that Ramco Rollers would be known across the letterpress and printing spectrum, even without a web presence. Which is why I'm bringing this to whoever it is reads my blather.

So here's the deal: Ramco Roller Products does roller rehab for letterpress printers. They have a quick turn-around, even for small fish like myself, and the work is excellent. The rollers that I have on the Gordon carry ink nicely & evenly. They're just the right elasticity or durometer or whatever to use in letterpress and, with Morgan Expansion trucks on the press, it's easy to set the rollers for type-high and go on with a job.
     I'm making a flat out recommendation: If you need rollers for your press, send Adrian an email [adrianramco[at]yahoo.com] and get his price list. Or call him up (909.592.1002). You'll find an economical source for quality rollers for you press. Even that one you have that you made roller cores out of steel bar stock.
 

The Tagalong Press Web Site

When the InterWebs first became available to mere mortals I was only peripherally involved in what's today called "educational technology." Soon enough, however, I learned that it was quite easy to use any number of software programs to build a web page. Of course back then all that really happened was the software's taking your graphical cues from mouse & keyboard settings and turning that into HTML, which was subsequently displayed more or less the way you want it to.
     Over the course of time I soon enough learned the basics of HTML code, which allowed me to do things that the original design software either ignored or was outright incapable of fudging into what I wanted. Added to my growing understanding of how easy it was to use somebody else's design code for my own page work, this made it easy for me to dream up work-arounds in other folks' code so mine would look a bit different here or there in the process.
     Then I discovered blogging.
     Once I had my first blog up and verbose, I began looking at how the blog's basic background worked. Now this was a bit after I'd come to understand – for a little understanding as I might ever know – how consolidated style sheets (CSS) worked. Together with that knowledge and my working out the arcane code structure involved in the blog pages I eventually settled on a background and look that I could mess with and still find graphically inviting to readers.
     Soon enough I set up my second blog, which was my first truly disbelief &/or anti-superstitionist writing. When I set that one up I took a different tack in the coding of the page lay out and eventually was able to adapt different versions of it for my third blog, a ham radio foray named after the ham radio gang I hung with back in the early 70s, Late Night Radio.
     At about this point I went back over my then-extant web sites and gave them the renewed look of what I was happy with on my blogs. That, of course led me to cut back a lot on the stuff I'd done in web page construction and eventually clean up what was a real hell-hole of butchered code & horrible lay out.

Which brings us to today . . .

One of the many things that I liked about the InterWebs and the abililty for normal bean heads such as myself was the public exposure. And even when "they" said that such exposure only opened a person up to identity theft & all its wonders, I still thought "Nah, not me."
     As if.
     Simple fact is, and plainly put, having a web presence is like asking for trouble.
     It's like living in a hippie house back in the 60s and hanging a big sign in the upstairs window that screams "BUST ME! BUST ME NOW!" at passing police cars.
     And having gone through that once in my life, I'm reluctant to even think about having it happen again. Which it did, I might add, at some point in the not too distant past with the sudden appearance of six different people with my exact names on three or four web sites & chat/instant messenger boards.
     Even one of my co-workers had a conversation with me while the real me was sitting right there next to my co-worker watching this all go down.
     The wimp pussied out when I took the keyboard.
     Undaunted by even that, I have kept some web presence for my ego to gloat over. Along the way I managed to clean up my basic pages and even develop a page set for the ham radio hobby side of my being. And, as President Kennedy said ". . . and do these other things."

So here and now, at this very moment unless you read this later, I am finally putting up a web site about my printing hobby. It's full of gratuitously self-promoting bullshit about me, how I came to learn how letterpress printing works and how I have managed to cobble together a collection of abused and ancient pieces of gear in the pursuit of hoarding stuff in my garage.
     Little else can explain it.
     So there you have it: I have letterpress print shop web site. You can go to it now, if you wish. Just remember, when you do, that I am really not quite done with it.
     Before long I'll have even more pictures of stuff nobody wants to know about and even a database that you can download to view of my collection of type by face, font, foundry, case number & approximate estimated date of casting.

Have a nice trip. Mind your ps and qs

 

Teach? Hell No! I'm Lucky to Have Fingers!

As you and whoever else is up for reading my stuff every now and then should know, I look for things that are tangential to my interests. Thus I look for letterpress and studio to see how many young whipper-snappers there are out in WebLandia setting up shop to smash type & ruin old equipment. Sometimes I look for C&P Pilot to see how many folks have one, think they need one or otherwise are into having a small, cast iron, side lever platen press in their lives or kitchens. Other times I look for other presses or combinations of press and letter &c just to get some feel for how quick Google will find me.
     But today's topic is about a combination of the above three search examples.
     Today is about C&P Pilot presses used by young whipper-snappers setting up letterpress studios and who then somehow feeling competent enough to teach the subject. Part of this, I am sure, comes from the desire to show off all the stuff the young whipper-snapper has to the folks who decide that they want to get into what Elbert Hubbard and William Morris – among other arts & crafts folks – got into two centuries back.
     Everybody loves show and tell.
     If you go to the web and look, you'll see 'em: folks teaching letterpress. Most of 'em are younger 'n my sons or at least not as old as the oldest. Some are old geezers like me who learned about this stuff from someone young enough to be their grandkids. Either way it works out that a lot of silly stuff gets passed on and nobody reads the books.
     And yes, there are books about letterpress. Here's one and here's another and here's a third and a fourth.

So let's start with the press. Like the big cast iron thing you smash type with. There are many of 'em out there in WebLandia and many more sitting in basements & other places since grandpa died that are never seldom considered until after the estate auction.
     Given that no American company has made any platen presses of a size easy enough to move into your garage or basement since about 1952, many of the presses still extant and not yet in museums or on junk piles have minor problems, rust being the easiest of the lot to see.
     A fair number of what's available have minor problems like missing rollers or a broken bracket to hold the feed and delivery boards. Some have been partially disassembled and of those many of the missing parts have already been sent off to India to turn into cheap doorknobs. A handful of the disassembled are laying in weed patches behind some greasy pile of dirt known locally as "the scrap yard." And then there are the ones that have been broken because stupid people with no common sense and absolutely no consideration for the laws of physics regarding leverage and force have tried to either move the presses partially disassembled or have broken pieces here and there in the process of disassembly. And then there are the ones that have been disassembled so another broken press can be repaired with pieces of an otherwise useable press somewhere else.
     And if that sounds dour and grim, tough. That's how it works.
     This is, however, where the beginners come in.
     See, many beginners have no idea what they're getting into. They've seen it on youtube.com or they have a friend who has seen it on youtube or maybe they have a friend who took a course with some local letterpress beginner who has since seen the affair in bits and pieces on youtube.
     Most of these folks are as dim as I am. If it weren't for all the safety doodads they'd have stuck their fingers under the running lawnmower just to see if the blade was sharp.
     Yeah, those kinds of idiots.
     Unbeknownst to most folks, printing is a serious business that takes advantage of some and overcomes many of the laws of physics. In any kind of printing there's the need to make chemical changes happen on paper so the ink stays there and still manages to be crisp and clear. It does this, one way or the other, by applying serious pressure to paper and type (or another transfer medium) so as to start the chemical process on its way.
     The amount of pressure is really obscene. In letterpress printing it works out to about 175 lbs per square inch being applied at the face of the type to the paper. On a platen press this pressure is distributed across the cross sectional area of the platen where the transfer takes place. On a cylinder press this pressure is applied briefly along the length of the impression roller across the type.
     Either way, given the stress involved, you'd think that presses are pretty damn durable. And they are. They're designed to compress and release that kind of pressure in a constrolled way. But they are not designed to have similar pressures applied to other parts of the press mechanism. Thus, if someone is disassembling a floor-mounted press and is in the process of removing the draw bars from the bed without anyone to hold the bed up, should the bed fall backwards – and believe me, it will – the supports for the bed at the bottom of the press are going to break. They are not part of the compression process. They are hinge points.
     And even if someone's standing back there to hold the damn thing up, unless they have a place to rest the bed end of the mechanism before it hits the deck, the same hinge points will break. That's 'cause the mechanism and hinge points were not designed for the stress of a 500 lb chunk of metal pulling the hinges up from where the press usually sits on the deck in operating condition.
     Simple physics. Any moron with eyes and sense of how things break could see it up front and country simple.
     But beyond that, there's all the bits and pieces of half-disassembled and commonly broken presses that people think they can cobble together, which is why folks will buy a "press" in the condition shown above. And then, when they come up with a broken piece such as shown here, they ask if it's repairable.
     No. It ain't repairable.
     The point of enquiry is a connecting point between the draw bars that pull the platen to the type. Remember the 175 lbs per square inch thingie?
     So short of finding another C&P Pilot (which is what we're looking at here) with all its parts or with just the parts needed to put another one back together in working condition to build a press, the money spent on the broken pieces and the basic guts of the machine may as well have gone down the toilet or into the hands of a InterWeb phishing outfit.
     This "press" ain't reparable. You want to fix it?
     Find another one that has all its parts.
     Simple enough.

At the same time as all this is going through my head from seeing one photo on the InterWebs, I'm thinking about how I'm moving with restoring a 1874-vintage George Phineas Gordon 9x13 platen press. This is one of those rare presses that, for the most part has all its original parts. The only new stuff on it are the roller trucks, a couple pieces of metal that have gone walk about but which can be replaced or recovered with locally available brass or steel stock. It's got years of oil and probably a couple decades of ink on it here and there. But it cycles cleanly and runs smoothly and, other 'n needing rollers recast or replaced, it's all there and ready to dance.
     Back when Mikey & I put the bed back on, I'd by that time already gotten the weight of the bed up off the deck and had reinstalled the roller arms. The roller arms are necessary because the main draw bars connect the bed to an eccentric shaft that works the throw off. (The mechanism is the same on a C&P floor press except that the position of the shaft in the mechanism is reversed.) So I had the bed up on blocks and the hinge pin in and we were all set to lift. Once we got the beast up there, the weight on the hinge pins was the weight of the bed & frame. Once we got the draw bars on and then the one larger draw bar that cycles the roller arms and initiates the closing of the platen to the bed, all we had to do was tighten nuts & bolts.
     Now all of this was easy cake to Mikey & me. Mike had been there when Tom & I took the beast apart and he'd seen how the mechanism required the bed standing off the floor until the hinge pin was out.
     So here I am with a nearly perfectly working press from the old days. I don't know how many of 'em there are, but I'd guess a bet that there are probably not more than 100 sitting in shops in working order. There are just too many places to mess up the cast iron. I know that 'cause I've seen one side casting of a similar press leaning against a garage wall with the front foot broken off.
     And the only thing I can say about that is that the broken piece was leaning on the wall of a garage in a house owned by a printer. I can only guess at how he broke that. Shudder to think that he thought he knew what he was doing.