I must confess I love my press

So, yesterday was a difficult day for me in the studio. ..  Penelope, my beloved press stopped working!

Since acquiring Penelope, my Chandler Price model-n, from Paul Aken at the Platen Press Museum last May I have been happily printing away on her several days a week.  She is a very rare and vintage Chandler Price press that was made over 50 years ago.  They don’t make them any more, nor do they make parts and not many people left know how to fix them.

Well last night while I was working my way through printing piles of Valentine’s Day cards she FROZE UP mid print.  Naturally I FREAKED OUT,,, had I broken my irreplaceable, rare, vintage piece of equipment?  Had I not been taking good enough care of her?  Was I not oiling her enough? Or using the right kind of oil? Was the pressure to high?  what was it?!  This is my baby I’ve been using and caring for over the last 6 months.  She is the basis of all the business I do.  She is EVERYTHING.  I just started to get to know her and all her little quirks and I have been getting really good at printing lovely work on her. And then all of a sudden …

Immediately I called Paul, the man who sold me the press, and luckily he answered (in fact, it’s lucky he’s still alive).  He asked me a bit about the issue and then told me he’d come down to my studio to take a look the next morning.  Thank goodness he’s still around otherwise I don’t know what I’d do.  He stopped by my studio this morning and after some tinkering, thankfully he was able to get her out of the jammed position and working again!

Letterpress printing is about precision.  The rails have the be the right height, there has to be the correct amount of packing for a good impression, there has to be the correct amount of ink, the trucks have to be the right size, the rollers have to be the right size  and have to hit the image to print at a very exact spot in order to pull a good print. With old presses many of these factors can change as the press is used  over time, thus throwing it all off. There are many different ways people adjust their presses based on some of these factors.  (Sorry if this is vague but it’s really hard to go into details without any prior knowledge of letterpress printing, so I’ll just leave it at that)

Anyways – MY specific issue was I had built up the rails so the rollers could be type-high and accurately hit the plates to print.  Apparently I had built the rails TOO high and they ended up jamming the press when it was in print.   (Why it had all of a sudden jammed yesterday and not any point in the last 6 months, we don’t know…) Needless to say, Paul instructed me to remove all the tape from the rails to prevent  further jams.  But this would leave the rollers too low to print correctly!  Paul’s advice – TAPE THE TRUCKS! Not the rails.  This is something I’ve read before on Briar Press but so many other people including Fritz at NA Graphics had instructed me to tape the rails.  So I did.

After a morning of working on adjustments, removing tape from the rails and re-taping the trucks, Penelope is back to working again!