Homeward bound

We set out with our old worn out minivan to pick up the letterpress. It was found buried under a bag of styrofoam peanuts and card board boxes. Sitting on a rickety little home made table, brilliant hammered metal green and more then a bit dusty. We blew it off, choked and sneezed on the resulting dust storm. Contemplated it's appearance and construction. Poked at the rollers to see how hard or soft they'd become over the years. We were very surprised when they were actually soft and springy and not hard as solid stone like we'd expected. We pulled the lever slowly watching carefully that our action wasn't about to rent some old piece of cast iron from it's proper place. Everything worked as one would expect, even the the singing little clang of the ink disk pawl ratcheting on the mechanism to forward the disk for new ink. A sound most likely not made from this beast for a few decades at least. My friend from work told me what they used to use it for. Showed me some of the plates they would use to make the molds, and even a few old molds made on the press that were laying around it. He said he remembers something being broken, but couldn't remember what it was and since it seemed to operate properly we agreed he was more than generous to let us take the press. This press really is a beast for being a small table top press. While I can mange to carry it on my own, though being very awkward to hold onto. It's is a task that is certainly better left to two, or even three fairly strong people. Something we found out after the wife and myself muscled it out of the stamp shop to the van. We took the little homemade table as well and some boxes of this and that, that my friend was sure belonged with the press. As a gesture of thanks we cleaned up tidied up the void left by the press. Upon rearranging the boxes and bags of peanuts we discovered there were two Hamilton type cabinets also buried in the shop. I proceeded to beg, plead and offer favored never possibly redeemable for the cabinets. Since my friends brother was not there at the time he would have to ask him and get back to us. With high hopes and convinced our arguments of feeing up space in the stamp shop we happily trucked our new green treasure back home where we did a repeat of the press carrying dance to get it into out basement family room soon to turn print shop.

Once is was home and well dusted, boxes sorted through and thoroughly "scoped" out it was discovered what the broken part was. Honer had an option called an "auto eject" which is supposed to facilitate with removing the printed sheet from the platen. It does this through the use of a pivoting rocker arm with a bearing that rides on a cam of sorts when the lever is pulled. That rocker arm is broken in two. For now that's not a big deal. It'll be a neat thing to play with in the future but it doesn't impede our ability to print currently so we'll set it aside and look into ways of fixing it in the future. Our bigger task at the moment is getting all the little things we'll need to go with it to actually put ink on paper. . . like ink!! We'll need type and a composing stick and some other things too so the search begins. . . . .