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.