There’s been a lot going on since the last update that I posted on the restoration of this platen – including a full studio relocation (not easy when you have an addiction to cast iron like I do…) – so I’m posting these slightly in retrospect!
Oh good, an audience
Back in April 2025, Ocean Studios ran a weekend event celebrating creative intersections in printmaking, called Print in Action. These events happen roughly twice a year, with a full weekend every other year.
We thought it might be fun to show something a little different to the usual presses on display or being used, but to show one in its parts being put back together again. I could chat to visitors about the history of the press, and they could see how it worked from the pieces arranged on the floor.
It also gave me a deadline … two days, probably about 100 parts, with a painful proportion being sodding heavy. Doors opened at 10 am on Saturday, and I got to work.
The hinge bolts connected to the, platen, the platens connected to the…
Slowly but surely the parts dwindled, and the press started to look more like I remembered it – just a lot, lot cleaner.
The beauty of these early presses is that, mechanically, they’re very simple – and being designed to be transported, almost everything was labelled in the factory. The bolts had numbers stamped into them! From new!
(And yes, those are custom printed top-gun style overalls.)
Have you, however, spotted the one teeny tiny flaw in my plan?
I built the press on the floor.
I’d been working on a bit of a “that’s a future Matt problem” approach, but as Saturday drew to a close, my colleagues were concerned about the parts being left out overnight. So with the power of a couple of pints in us from the evening celebrations, a trolley was found, and the press was deadlifted – yes, DEADLIFTED – up onto it.
I still haven’t a clue how we did that. Probably best not to know.
Here it is on said trolley, and after two days and a lot of encouragement from friends, family and fellow printmakers, I got it together into one piece.
Genuinely, the satisfaction of turning the flywheel and having the platen cycle was immense. Not perfect, not calibrated, but it was together again. As the event drew to a close, we trundled it into my studio and, with a lot of help from gravity, got it off the trolley into place.
So.
The clutch mechanism still wasn’t happy, and the treadle still missing. With the frame assembled though, I could start seriously thinking about these parts, and getting the calibration of the platen reset ready to print.
But those are future Matt problems. Again.
Oh, and just for my own amusement
Just because I can’t help myself, for the event, I also made a small run of RISO posters to commemorate my suffering:
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