Something I have discovered about letterpress printing is that, as soon as you mention to other printmakers that you share a common interest in this now rather niche field, it seems that tools and equipment begin, rather literally, to appear out of the woodwork.
This is exactly how I ended up the proud owner of an “Arab” crown folio platen printing press.
I’d travelled to a local town, chasing an Adana 8×5 that had appeared on that most notorious of wild-west websites – Facebook Marketplace. Cue meeting a lovely older gentleman in a shed, who was looking to dissolve his printing works which had sat dormant for some years following COVID shutdowns and serious medical issues. He’d decided enough was enough, and time to clear out. The deal went smoothly, with a good price for the Adana shaken on (with a few freebies thrown in), and we got to chatting about letterpress.
It was then the chap said, “You wouldn’t be interested in another press, would you? Free to a good home”
Following him through a rather beaten-up door labelled “Press Room”, he indicated into the corner, where sat one, rather dusty, Arab Crown Folio Press.
“If you can get it out of here, you can have it,” says the chap.
Apparently, this press had been given to him under the same conditions some 30+ years ago while he was setting up his printing business, and more than happy to offer it out to another printmaker who would take good care of it and get it back-ship shape and bristol fashion.
Oh. Hell(box).
I did have to give this some thought and tried not to let the immediate child-like response of “Oh absolutely yes, I’ll take it” cloud my grown-up reasoning. This was a big and very damn heavy undertaking, with a lot of work to commit to. On the other hand, how often do these opportunities present themselves, particularly so close to home? I of course did the sensible thing and went away thinking it over, and asked much more responsible adults than me what they thought. The responses I got?
“Do it”, “Oh absolutely you’ve got to”, “When are we going to get it?”, “It’s not that heavy”, “GET ITTTTTT”.
Friends, Family – all very bad influences.
Right, so not so responsible then. Or I chose to ask people I knew would agree with me – we’ll never know.
How hard could it be?
With a tool bag full of spanners, pry bars, wedges and a blowtorch, I returned a few weeks later with backup to see if we could get the damn thing out.
Theoretically, it would be an easy (ha!) task. These presses were designed to be dismantled and rebuilt – the manual even goes as far as to say anyone handy enough with a screwdriver would be competent enough to build an Arab.
Other than thick layers of dried oil, grime and great, the press had been well maintained up until roughly 2020, and the current owner had shown me it running on its motor drive, so I was fairly confident it wasn’t seized solid.
I’d found some disassembly instructions online 1 , which we attempted to follow, but we immediately abandoned them for the “Unbolt everything in a reasonably methodical order” approach. The aim of the game was to try and get as much weight off of the frame as anything so we might be able to lift the thing into a waiting van. Fundamentally the mechanisms are simple, so I figured Future Matt would be able to reason his way out of putting it back together (remember to quote me on that).
Overall, my naive initial confidence that we could get the press to pieces was, for the most part, proven right. With a little persuasion, most bolts undid without a fuss, and components came away with very little fuss – at least nothing a stout thump from a rubber mallet and a stuffing great adjustable spanner couldn’t overcome. That, however, changed rather rapidly…
The first part to fight back we were at least warned about. Back in the 80’s when the chap first acquired this press, some bodging was done to the smaller drive gear to get it to lock to the main drive shaft. He seemed to remember superglue was involved.
After an hour and a half of heating, levering, drilling, swearing and hammering, it became clear it wasn’t just glue, but in fact, a broken-off hardened steel Allen key jammed in the keyway. Once we drove the gear backwards off the offending bit of steel, it could be ground back and the gear slid neatly off the end of the shaft.
You don’t want to know how I labelled that gear in my little inventory system of parts, but you can be sure it wasn’t a friendly name.
The flywheel was well and truly stuck on the drive shaft, but at least with the gear off the other side we could pull both out of the frame and continue disassembly.
The next part to fight back was the throw-off pin. It rotated around nicely where it sat, but some utter berk in the past decided to paint the rest of the shaft, meaning it refused to drift in either direction without a lot of cleaning, scraping and persuasion. Every piece of wood I brought along for safe hammering was slowly reduced to matchsticks as the pin shifted millimetre by agonising millimetre. By this point we’d been there for over 6 hours, senses of humour were running very thin, and we decided to cut our losses and drop off the first batch of parts to my studio, and come back another day for the rest.
We soaked the parts in WD-40, and ran away.
Two weeks later with fresh energy and a much, MUCH bigger hammer, we returned. Within the space of an hour, the offending pin was free, the last parts were finally stripped off, and the frame could finally be lifted out, carried down the garden path, and taken away.
What have I done…
And this is how I came to have an almighty pile of cast iron sitting in my studio, turning it temporarily from print shop to scrapyard. But, I’m a happy chap, finally getting to own my very own piece of letterpress history, and of course, having another huge project to procrastinate with.
Oh, and if anyone ever says to you that a printing press doesn’t weigh that much – these are lies.
A massive thank you to my long-suffering friend James who very kindly helped me (twice) in collecting the parts of this 915kg behemoth.
Join me next time after I’ve had time to reconsider my life decisions when we’ll take a bit more of a look at the press and discuss my plans for it. Yes, I do have a plan – no need to look so surprised!
Resources & References
- Arab Press Manual (PDF) – https://readingtype.org.uk/wwp/ArabPlaten.pdf
- Arab Parts List (PDF) – https://drukwerkindemarge.org/download/documentatie/arabparts.pdf
- Arab Press Dismantling Guide – https://britishletterpress.co.uk/presses/platen-presses/the-arab/taking-an-arab-apart/ ↩︎
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