Category: Printing presses

Cleaning the Thompson ink fountain (Part 2)

After spending a few hours across several evenings, I have the ink fountain from our Thompson press cleaned off and fully disassembled. It took several treatments with the paint stripper to get everything clean. There was no way to distinguish

Thompson Press in motion

This post is a bit of a cheat; I currently can’t upload still photos (WordPress is not generating the reduced-size versions of the images), so I’m basing today’s post on a video. After getting my Thompson press in January, we

Cleaning the Thompson ink fountain

Most of the dirt on our Thompson platen press is a mix of dust, lint, and oil which can be removed with a soft brush and a vacuum cleaner. However, the ink fountain suffers from years of encrustation of dried

The big monster printing press

This press is our latest acquisition. It actually came from what are now the premises of KwartzLab, the former home of Pandora Press. This machine is a Thompson-British Automatic Platen Press, weighing in at about 1525kg (3360lbs). It fills the

Our workhorse printing press

The press we do most of our work with is a Chandler and Price 7×11 Old Style. This is a hand-fed treadle-driven letterpress. When we got the press it was set up for motor drive, had an ink fountain, but

Our smallest printing press

Our smallest printing press is a Kelsey Excelsior 5×8 Model U tabletop press. When we got it it was suffering from fire and water damage. Most of the paint was worn off, there was rust all over, and the rubber

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