A lot was involved between my last post with Lola comfortably sitting in the bed of my truck and her current position on a slightly rickety cart in my upstairs shop.
I enlisted the help of two of my son’s friends to hoist her up the stairs and onto a wheeled stainless steel cart intended for kitchen equipment, not 210 lb presses. They each got a bar of Cadbury milk chocolate from England (much tastier than what is for sale here in the US). I had fretted about the transport up the stairs for two weeks and these chaps accomplished it in less than 5 minutes.
I had greased and oiled and cleaned the press before moving it, but I hadn’t been able to fully move the bed. It turned out that a screw head was interfering with the transport back and forth. I filed it down and the bed glides nicely back and forth now. At rest, it rocks in the center as it is supposed to.
The next task was packing the cylinder. This involved tracking down some red pressboard, which I found at NA Graphics. I bought several sheets as this stuff is nearly impossible to find these days. Fortunately it isn’t something that needs changing all that often. After much experimentation I ended up with a cylinder much more packed than expected: mylar>tympan paper>pressboard>pressboard>mylar. On the bed, if I am printing American type I use another sheet of pressboard under the galley.
In my last post I said that Didot height would not work on this press but I am happy to say I was wrong. The rollers on the press are adjustable to a degree and it appears that whoever had it last set them to a deep setting. Rather than alter all 4, I have decided to just pack under the galley to adjust type height. This means there is enough space for the higher type. In fact, if I removed the galley I would be able to print Italian height if needed.
I am locking up type in a chase and then sliding that onto a galley for printing. Having a gripper on the cylinder really simplifies the printing process although I would need to make some alterations to use it for accurate registration. It is held onto the cylinder with springs and with some effort the mechanism can be moved back and forth. It would need a fixed location to be effective. The movement is necessary to get it out of the way when applying the tympan so a fixed location cannot be a permanent solution. I have thought of using a grid under the mylar for paper alignment, but getting it perfectly straight would be a trick.
I did not know I would be using this press to print metal type. I had thought I would be making small posters with wood type. However, I decided to use it to pull a proof for a page in the current project rather than ink up the Pilot, proof, mess around, get sticky dirty ink, etc. I was surprised by how good it looked and once I fixed the myriad typos and spacing issues, I printed the page on the Poco. Of course the inking leaves much to be desired but considering how the Pilot was behaving with the same issue, my poor hand-inking technique was actually an improvement.
I am still trying to fix the alignment on the Pilot, and it isn’t going particularly well, so for the time being I will be using the Poco for all my letterpress. I should be able to print a 5x7 form on the Pilot, but he says otherwise (two of my presses are female, two are male). I have another project in the nascent stage that I want to print on the Pilot so I need to solve these issues.