I am in Kansas City for a few days watching basketball with my dad. The day before I left, Robbi and I decided to take the press for a spin and see if we could get it to actually print.
We have the ultimate luxury of having a good friend who just happens to be a master printer. His name is Jim and he lives about 100 yards from the barn.
We asked Jim to swing by and show us a thing or two.
The first step was setting our printing plate into the “chase” which is an iron frame that snaps into the press. the plate holds the type in place and the chase holds the plate in place.
Jim used “furniture” (strips of wood the same height as the plate) to make the plate fit snugly in the chase.
Once everything was “packed out” (in other words, filled with furniture) Jim inserted the quoins, turned the key, and tightened everything in place.
Meanwhile, I was busy doing the really important work, which was wiping decades of crud off of the “disk,” which is the round metal piece that holds the ink throughout the printing process.
After he had set up our plate in the chase, Jim put a piece of typman paper onto the surface that would be holding the paper we would be printing on. Tympan paper, which is like a thick, smooth wax paper, provides a smooth, clean surface that protects the paper (and that can be slightly “built up” in certain places to create a deeper impression when the type hits the paper. These are the nuances of printing that will take a long time to learn.
Robbi, meanwhile, was busy cutting our polymer plate into smaller pieces.
Jim inserted the chase (with plate) into the press.
All of us admired the fruits of my vigorous wiping.
Jim applied several blobs of ink to the disk.
And Robbi reveled in a moment of pure “OMG, are we about to actually print something?” bliss.
We turned on the press to see what would happen. As the press moves, the rollers roll up over the disk, thus getting inked. Once every cycle through the rolling process, the disk turns a tiny bit, which, over time, causes the entire disk (and every bit of the rollers) to get covered in ink.
As shown.
Although the aim is for the rollers and the disk to be inky, the plate itself is NOT supposed to be inky. Not at all.
But, for whatever reason, the rollers were too close to the plate, which caused our plate to be entirely coated in ink.
The only thing that should be getting inked is the polymer, which we hadn’t even bothered to mount on the plate at this point. And good thing we didn’t, because it would have created a mess.
I have it on good authority that Robbi and Jodi have since solved the worn-down truck problem and will soon be showing you photos of their first successful printing efforts.
But for today, I thought I’d chronicle the first failure.
There are likely to be many more to share in days to come.
