The Shop Photos

Was a time when the only way I could get a view of somebody else's shop was to get in the car, drive over to wherever it was and stand around in the middle of things. That or get some pictures taken, which pictures I would summarily lose 'cause that's the way I am.
     Such is the case no more. Now we have the InterWeb and PhotoBucket and Flickr and Picasa. Now you or me or the next moron can put all the family photos, boring or interesting or provocative, on the InterWeb and share the horrified stares of disbelief.
     To that end I uploaded a pile of pictures to the APA yahoo.com server so folks could see that, in addition to carping about stuff and being less than assiduous in my own way on other fronts, my printery bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pristine, organized, thoughtful & ergonomic set up that my father had in his days of peace and tranquility. No, my shop looks like the butt-end of a garage what ain't seen a broom in a while and was only lightly dusted-down a couple hours ago before I took the pictures.
     See, that's the deal about visiting: you gotta be ready for it.
     Somebody calls you up and says "Hey, yo, I'm coming over to see your stuff" and the next however many minutes you've got is spent in cleaning up. Like emptying trash cans been full for weeks (or in my case, months) and picking up all the slips of paper and whatever else fell between platen and bed the last press run.
     And maybe even distributing that nearly-pied couple galleys of 8 pt Kennerley you smashed up real good 'cause you didn't check where the gauge pins were when you pulled that proof last year before Christmas.

Ain't that way with photos, is it? I mean, you've got PhotoShop to dust out all the rusty corners and spice up the contrast so the butt-end of the garage doesn't look like the dimly-lit butt-end of the garage that it really is.

At which point I can get back to reality and show off what's what and make a few comments about it. So I'll start with the press, the C&P 10x15 that's been the workhorse press for the past 20-odd years.
     Found it in a field, I did. Seriously.
     The late Bill Thompkins, former shop foreman at Wright State University's printing plant, suggested one day that I come by and look at a press he had sitting in the field behind his own printing shop in nearby suburbia. He said it had been out there in the weather a while but maybe I could use some of the parts.
     A few days later I went over to see what Bill had.
     He had the basic parts of a 10x15 NS sitting in the weeds for however long he'd had it there – and there was a rusted-to-hell Miehle outside the front door to the shop – with the platen laying face down in the mud and the bed staring at the sky. The flywheel, belt wheel, roller arms and other bits were laying around in the weeds. Other than the platen being pitted and rusted about an eighth inch deep, most of it looked salvageable.
     I left and came back with some young friends and a pickup truck. We stuffed everything bigger than a Nissan back seat into the truck and carried off some of the other stuff in my car. When we got home we unloaded it all into the garage and I started doing the inventory of what was and what weren't.
     What weren't came down to the pinion gear, ink disk, platen cam follower, the pin that holds the roller arm lever on to the frame, a few nuts and bolts and a free working mechanism.
     The large gear with the platen cam race in it was frozen in time, rusted into place.
     And the platen was horribly corroded.
     It didn't look hopeful.
     So I went back to Bill's shop and we found the ink disk, three chases, a few pieces of the throw-off mechanism (but no throw off lever) and a couple roller trucks. All this stuff was inside the building. I guess that Bill had planned on moving it into whatever space he could find – and there weren't much, what with the shop full of two color offset presses and all the fixings. Only problem was, between not getting around to it and getting some of the stuff under a roof, he'd picked pretty much all the small stuff and left the two biggest and most important parts out in the rain for who knows how long.
     Back in the garage I started chasing down parts and found a couple pinion gears in various places on the east coast. I bought one and later bought another.
     I took the parts that were mobile and started brushing them down and getting the rust off. I removed a couple years worth of mud and weeds from between shafts and levers and linkages. I didn't know what I was gonna do with the platen.
     So one day I was at the post office and noticed a truck in the lot with a portable welder in the back. I had noticed that one of the points on the press – where the roller arm lever hooks up – had been cracked and reassembled with cap screws. I thought I might have to get that welded.
     I walked into the post office and asked the one fellow at the counter if he were the owner of the truck. He said he was and I told him about my welding needs. He said he taught at the local vocational school and he'd be glad to come by and look at what I had. When he was finished with his business he got in his truck and followed me back to my digs.
     The cracked parts & cap screws looked fine, he said. If I really thought it was necessary he would set up a time and come over to zap things back together. Then I showed him the platen and mentioned the missing cam follower.
     Those things were easy, he said. He would take the platen to school and give it to one of the students to machine and polish. He took some measurements of the cam raceway and the shaft of the platen rocker. He'd already looked at the roller arm lever point and said he could fix up a pin for that too.
     I handed him a Xerox copy of the C&P press parts list. We shook hands, I thanked him for his time and he drove off with the platen in the back of his truck.
     
The press still wouldn't turn, and not just because I was missing the pinion gear. The large gear itself, rusted into place, was depressing to look at, even after I had scraped and brushed and primed and painted.
     I had previously poured about a quart of oil & WD40 into the lube holes on the main gear shaft. Everything else that needed to move within the frame of the press had loosened up fairly easily. The throw-off linkages worked and the roller arms moved around in their channels. Only the roller arm springs were stuck.
     But for all the oil and kerosene and other lubricants I could get into the oil holes for the main gear shaft, nothing even suggested success. I resorted to brute force.
     I took a large piece of square steel stock and used two vise-grip pliers to put it between one pair of teeth on the gear. The stock extended out from the gear enough so that I could put the drawbar on that side on the eccentric gear pin and push against the bar. I pushed. I tapped. I rocked the drawbar around the pin and pulled and tapped against the square stock on one side and then the other. Slowly the gear began to move. Eventually it moved a quarter turn, then full around. Within a few minutes I had the entire movement of the press – other than the roller springs – free and operational.

A few days later I got a phone call from the fellow at the vocational school. He said he had some stuff to bring over. I said I'd be there. A short time later he pulled up into the driveway.
     We pulled the platen out of the back of his truck. He had covered the surface with a couple sheets of corrugated cardboard. When he took the cardboard off, the surface of the platen shone like a mirror. The students had leveled it to within micrometers of true and run a polisher over it so the surface was smoother than it had ever been, probably since the day it was cast.
     Then he handed me the cam race follower. It fit the rocker shaft and the cam race perfectly.
     And the pin for the roller arm linkage was threaded on one end and it and the cam follower had been heat hardened.
     I asked him what he wanted for all the work.
     Nothing, he said. He thanked me for having given him a project for the students that had something to do with real machine work. I insisted on giving him something for his efforts. He refused. He suggested that I vote for the next school levy.
     Mom as a school teacher.
     I told him that I never voted against a school levy.
     He thanked me. We shook hands and I got out more paint and another brush.

I ran the first job on the press around 1985. I figure that, between all the hobby printing I've done and the few commercial jobs that I let myself get finagled into, there have been at least a million impressions on the backyard press since then.
     I had to remove and rebuild the roller arm springs and I had to make a throw-off lever out of a large piece of steel bar stock. I made a set of fingers out of steel strap. I've had the rollers recast three times now, the last from Brown Regrinding Service, which is no longer in business and to me sorely missed.
     The serial number on the press (C65164) dates the press by available records to 1923, when my father would have been 12 years old, and a year after his mother took her life. It probably started out in a school – the original paint is that bizarre soft "institutional green" – and how it ended up in Bill Thompkins' back yard is anybody's guess. But it's sat on the concrete in two garages for 20-odd years now and it's been a true pleasure to run.
     I hope to get many more impressions out of it before it goes into my own estate auction. It's certainly a survivor.

The other press presently in the shop is a C&P Old Style Pilot that I bought from Jack and Henry Schwartz back some twenty-two years ago. It came into the shop around the same time that I succeeded in getting the 10x15 up and running.
     Jack & Henry were two brothers who owned a printing plant on Ludlow Street in downtown Dayton, Ohio. When I was a high school student I would walk past their shop every day after school, headed toward the first bus stop in the line that took me home to a suburb south of Dayton. On many occasions I would walk past and catch a whiff of the smell of ink coming out of the second story where I later learned their presses were located.
     By the time I got to know Jack & Henry, I was halfway to being an orphan. Dad had been dead a couple years and I had found Schwartz Brothers Printing Equipment in the phone book while wondering where I could get some leads and slugs. I called and enquired. The gruff voice on the other end said he could set me up. Just come by and come up to the second floor.
     As I walked up the stairs I could hear a press running. And then there was this loud mechanical crunch and thud. I wondered what madhouse I was entering. As it turned out, I had just heard Jack & Henry's huge old Seybold paper cutter cycle through a lift. It was right by the door to the shop and it looked about as safe as wearing a gasoline suit to a forest fire.
     Over the course of the next couple years I bought bits and pieces of stuff off the Schwartz brothers. Leads, slugs, galleys, a miterer. From time to time I'd put a note or card in the bundles mentioning that Jack & Henry had this or that piece of equipment they were selling or mention that they were a good source of parts like roller cores and the like. Then I found out they had a couple Pilot presses.
     Now I'd never gotten a Pilot 'cause I never seemed to have the money when one became available. I also had more than enough press room, what with the 10x15 up and running and the 9x12 Franklin Gordon (yes, a real Franklin Gordon of 1880s vintage). But I'd always wanted a Pilot, if only 'cause it was in keeping with my philosophy of "save everything" by which I ran at the time.
     So I found two buyers for the Pilots that Jack & Henry had for sale and arranged for the buyers to meet with Jack & Henry to pick up the presses. We went over to the shop in a van and Jack & Henry rolled the presses out of their shop and onto the elevator. On the way down, Jack asked me if it were my doing that had gotten them so much business from hobby printers.
     One of the fellows with us said "Yeah. He has stuff all the time in the bundles about your shop."
     Jack smiled. He leaned closer to me and said in a low voice that he had a Pilot upstairs that needed a lever but was otherwise complete.
     I said I didn't have any money.
     Jack said something very unusual. He said "Pay me later."
     I'd never heard Jack or Henry talk in terms of paying later. And most of the time it was Henry who decided what the price should be. I realized I had just sailed into unchartered waters.
     I asked Jack how much he wanted.
     "Oh, let's say $200. You can pay me later."
     We went back up the elevator to the third floor where pigeons flew in and out of broken windows across an expanse of cast iron antiquities. Jack found the Pilot in question, we wrestled it onto the floor truck and rolled it onto the elevator. The elevator stopped at the second floor. It was Henry. He wanted to know what was up.
     Jack explained that he was selling me the incomplete press. "Two hundred dollars," he said.
     Henry grunted. The elevator doors closed and we descended to the ground floor.
     "Don't talk with Henry about this," Jack said.
     "Mum's the word. And thank you very much for the favor. I'll pay you . . ."
     "Don't mention it. And especially not to Henry."
     Jack & I shook hands. My fellow cast iron addicts loaded the third press into the van and we drove off.
     I visited Jack a couple weeks later and handed him $200 on the sly.