In the last post, we took a look at a bit of a plan of attack for the restoration and rebuild of my 125 year old platen printing press (which if you missed, you can read here). That last post was a little while ago (apparently I’m not great at regular posting!), so lets get up to speed.
Having a breakdown. Of parts, that is.
I started by taking the frame down to the bare minimum of components – taking back off any of the pieces I had put together for safekeeping (making sure to label them) – and then set to it with the paint scraper to get back to the bare iron.
Not a difficult job, but pretty nasty and time consuming, and hopefully worth it to give the new coats of paint a much better base. It also became apparent quite quickly that the last repaint this press had was probably in-position, which came with some issues.
Pretty much every oil way was clogged up with either dirt or paint, and there was even some on the internal bearing surfaces (bad!) – all of which I’ve now cleaned up and cleared out.
Spot the ever-present pile of battleship grey paint flakes, that ended up pretty much everywhere in my studio.
Each part, once cleaned, got a decent coat of red oxide primer to seal up the cast iron surface, and prepare it for the top coat. This stage was pretty satisfying, and was a good motivator to keep going!
Make Do & Mend
While dealing with the painting, I also have started to address the pieces that need repairing, starting with the smashed feed table bracket.
From the looks of the break, it seemed that this wasn’t the first time the part had broken, as there were some tell-tale signs of a previous repair, which appeared to have been attempted by welding. Cast iron is a bit of a notorious b*%$!£d to weld, so I approached one of my colleagues for advice on what to do.
He said to leave it with him, and within 24hrs he’d drilled out the broken section, and brazed in a brand new mild steel post (including locking pin)! Legend. This will be way stronger than the original, and definitely stronger than another attempted brazing or welding of the cracked part.
The more critical part that needed some thought was the butchered drive system.
After the fight it took to get the small cog off the main shaft, I wasn’t really in a hurry to botch repair it again, so had a rummage in the box of parts to see if, with the help of an engineer friend, we could figure out what the system should have been.
We still haven’t quite got it sussed, but from what we can put together, it seems as though the clutch relies on a set of ball bearings to take the torque from the drive shaft and transfer it to the gear, while at the same time having a built-in over torque safety – if the press jammed for instance, the ball bearings should slip (probably with an almighty bang), stopping too much force being pushed through to the platens.
To engage/disengage the drive, the outer bronze ring looks like some sort of running surface – one that suspiciously fits inside one of the “to be identified” pieces that were stuffed under the press when I collected it. Unfortunately, it looks like this part has also broken, but it seems like too much of a coincidence that these pieces match together – so I’m going to repair the break, and then see if I can figure out how they should work together.
I did reach out to an expert on these presses, but they didn’t recognise the parts, and said they are likely an after-market addition. They weren’t particularly keen on the idea of it going on the press – but I rather like it, so I’m going to try and get it back on and operating. If anyone reading this has any ideas, do get in touch!
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