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.