My Impression

So I wasn't entirely happy with how my Braden Sutphin ink was performing on paper. It just seemed a little...squishy. I read a lot of opinions on Briar Press, e-mailed some fellow printers, and tried to dig a little deeper into the whole "eco" ink debate. I'd like for my shop to be as eco-friendly as possible, as healthy for me as possible, AND have my prints look as rad as possible. I feel like the whole soy ink thing has been pretty firmly rejected at this point as being any more eco-friendly than traditional oil and rubber based letterpress inks. So I started thinking about the "vegetable based" idea some more and read that in the old days, all oil-based letterpress inks were made from vegetable and seed oils. It seems that these days most are made from petroleum oils instead, which is obviously not the friendliest. I read several people promoting the fact that Charbonnel etching inks are still made with linseed oil and a heavy pigment load, which makes them great for letterpress and a lot more like printing was "in the old days."

I also read that Charbonnel inks work well for large areas of coverage, which I'll definitely need for my various holiday card designs. As I mentioned before, I've decided to try out Somerset papers for these cards because they supposedly score/fold well. Today I did a quick test on my Pilot with s combination of Charbonnel inks and Somerset paper, and it did look really nice. The edges were crisp, even with a deep impression.


Speaking of impression, I've come to the conclusion that I just can't get a lot of it with my Pilot. It does a fine amount for small pieces like the one above, but a lot of my designs are fairly dense and I just can't get the pressure I need on my little table top guy. I've tried all sorts of packing materials, methods, and amounts...but when it comes down to it I just can't get enough pressure. I don't want to kill myself or crack the arm of my little guy, so I think I'll just have to stick to smaller designs (like business cards) on the Pilot. Luckily I've got my 8 x 12 C&P also, which so far has done great with impression over larger areas.

This was the first time I've actually PRINTED in over a month or so...I've been so busy doing backend planning and such. It felt really nice. Cleanup of Charbonnel using only vegetable oil went about like it had for all other inks - took a while, but worked pretty well in the end.

My holiday card designs are for sale on the Goode Green website, even though I haven't actually made any plates, bought any paper, bought any ink, OR tested any of the prints. Scary! This is me practicing jumping into something without overanalyzing and overpreparing, and seeing what happens. I DID spend forever pricing those suckers, though. Man is it complicated. Now I'm off to work some more on my website...cheerio!

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 9/16/09: "First Train Home" (Imogen Heap). Seriously dude...the Alice In Wonderland references that keep popping up in my life are uncanny.

I Think I'm Starting To Get The Hang...

...of platen presses. I'm learning the ins and out of jiggering with taping the rails, moving the gauge pins, adjusting the packing, and ink distribution. I'm sure there are still many more tricks to discover, but for now I'm happy that things are getting easier instead of harder. Today I did a custom run of a bunch of "Yay!" Peggins cards for Beth, who as a teacher has many graduates to whom to send congratulatory cards this summer.

Registration for this 2 color run was a little tricky, as you can see the filling for the Peggins' bodies can't be the slightest bit off or you can see it sticking out of the blue line. Luckily, I tend to make what seems at the time to be an absurd amount of extras for makeready. With one color jobs or two color jobs with crop marks for registration, the makeready to product ratio is a bit better, but with this one I ended up with about 70 good cards out of the 110 I started with. This means I've got a few extra that I've put up for sale in my Etsy shop - hop to it if you want one! The cards are a bright blossom color with white and blue printing, and they come paired with a chartreuse envelope. Adorable, if I do say so myself.

I had planned on stopping there with the Pilot for today, and going into work on my 8 x 12 for some really cute custom note cards for Page. They're #10 size, just like the Tea Menus from last week, so I need the 8 x 12 bed and base size. However, it has been insanely thunderstorming all day and I didn't fancy wading out to the car with all my inks and paper. So, those cards will have to wait until tomorrow (sorry Page!), but I can't wait to see them printed. The colors are going to rock. So, instead I opted to stay home and print another job on the Pilot - some coasters from my "Dead Things" series. Since I had already printed up some of the prehistoric beast stationery, I decided to continue with him on the coasters.

I wasn't able to get a very deep impression on these, but I think that's OK. I get afraid when I have to pull down too hard on the Pilot's arm that it's going to crack, plus this coaster stock is really thick and stiff. I think the black print on the surface with just a touch of impression looks mighty dandy, and as soon as I take pictures in their final packaging I'll put those up for sale too. Now that I'm out of things to procrastinate with, I guess I'll clean my press. AGAIN. I'm seriously considering videoing a "Get Great Arms With Letterpress" exercise series - left arm does the arm pulling/wheel turning, and right arm does the scrubbing.

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 6/19/09: "Do You Feel Loved" (U2).

An Ode To Vegetable Oil

Oil of veggie you kick so much ass,

Your yellow demeanor belies your true sass.

Letterpress cleanup is always a chore,

But you make it so easy to do and what's more -

There are no toxic fumes burning inside my nose,
And my small future spawn will not come with webbed toes!

Your myriad of uses really is quite a stunt,

You polish wood floors, and you make a great bundt!

Veggie oil, I hope that we're friends for all time,
Now this is the end of my a-ma-zing rhyme.

First Custom Job

As I mentioned last post, I'm currently working on several custom jobs. Today I set about printing, and I'm pretty happy with the results of this calling card:

It's referred to as a "calling card" both because of the simple amount of information, and because it's slightly bigger than a regular business card at 2.5" x 3.5". I had been wanting to try out French Paper's Muscleonte paper (140#), and since Barbara wanted an aqua color this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I was curious to see if the extra heavy weight would take an impression well, but it seems it was a little too "muscular." I finally got a decent impression after adding a lot of packing, but I probably won't use this paper again.

As for ink, I finally dove in and bought some Earth Pride from Braden Sutphin last week on a recommendation from a fellow letterpresser. It's vegetable based, contains less than 5% V.O.C.s, and comes in all the regular Pantone colors, unlike Van Son's VS Zero which I was previously excited about. I decided it would just be too difficult to try and mix colors using only the CMYK of VS Zero, but since I bought some I may test out some of the solid colors at some point. Overall, I'm really happy with the Earth Pride. It doesn't really smell like much, which makes my headache-prone sinuses very happy. It's a little on the soft side, but not unworkable. It definitely forms a crust in the can and isn't meant to be left "open" on the press for extended periods of time, but neither of those things really bother me. Cleanup was really quite easy using only vegetable oil. I'll probably continue to experiment with other inks, but for now I'm pretty happy with what I've got.

As long as I had all the packing and everything set up on the press, I decided to go ahead and test print using some of my hand made papers recycled from junk mail. At some point I'd love to be using all my own paper, and after this exciting test I think it will just be a matter of figuring out how to produce sheets with consistent thickness. My various papers took impression much better than the French Paper, and I think the textural elements look really snazzy:

I was a little afraid of ink bleed on the hand made papers, but as you can see the print stayed really crisp. This means that either the papers rock, the inks rock, or the combination of the two rocks! I'm really excited to see that it worked, because I was starting to think that printing on my own papers wouldn't be feasible. WOO!!

Note to self: Rubber bands are your friends, until they're not.
I've realized that it's pretty necessary to use a rubber band across the grippers of the Pilot, because I rarely use a sheet of paper big enough to be held on by the grippers. This was working well, as I had the rubber band positioned perfectly across the middle of the card where there was no printing. Until about the last 25 cards or so, I was getting pretty frustrated by an indentation in the cards I was sure was due to some uneven packing under the tmypan. Then the rubber band slipped a little and actually blocked out part of the print, and I realized it had been sitting right where the impression was happening.

I moved said rubber band higher up on the card so it just barely hit some of the crop marks, and all of my problems were solved. No more random impression, no more uneven print. I got a decent amount of prints done once I had fixed the problem, but I wish I had noticed it sooner. I can't wait until I've been doing this for a bit longer and I have all these things stored up in my brain. Someday my prints will be perfect...or closer anyway. I find that in general, letterpress is a really good lesson in imperfection for me. And with that - I'm off...maybe more printing this weekend!

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 6/5/09: Depeche Mode (Hole To Feed).

N.I.B., Production Technician

I think I can safely say that this was my first "official" day of letterpress production. Even though I'm still in the test phase with the water-based inks, if these notecards turn out well and not too smudgerific I'll probably put them up for sale.


These would work as a great all purpose stash if you just want to tell someone "crap, I'm an asshole" or even "sorry your dog died." I have some more handy lessons I've learned from today's printing on the Pilot:

Lesson #1: Don't clean the Boxcar base with oil.

After my last printing session, I guess I got a little carried away with the canola and wiped down my Boxcar base to get the last traces of ink away. In my letterpress classes they always warned me not to be tempted to wipe down the base with anything really, even mineral spirits. Sure enough, when I went to stick the plate back on today it went sliding around, totally unsticky. So I had to use some serious elbow grease to um, de-grease the base before the plate would stick again.

Lesson #2: Distribute the ink on the disc and rollers BEFORE putting the chase in.

This probably seems obvious, but is a small breakthrough for me because I had been cranking away on the arm to distribute the ink after putting the chase in. This meant I had to be very careful not to let the rollers ALL the way down or I'd ink the tympan. If you work it out before putting the chase in, it's a lot easier. Duh.

Lesson #3: Slow pressure yields better ink coverage.

I went through a lot of test prints before arriving at the method that ended up working pretty consistently, and found that a slow OOOOOMPH on the print yielded better results than a quick SNAP. Not really sure why.

Lesson #4: Rubber bands are your friends.

It took some practice, but finally I got the rubber bands across the grippers in a place that was helpful and not in the way of the print. The only problem I ended up having was that the rubber bands I found were old and a little sticky, and the paper kept glomming onto them as I pulled it away from the plate, whacking out and creating interesting random ink stripes from hitting the rollers. Eventually (as in, after I took this picture) I ended up taping a piece of paper to the top rubber band so my cards slid free more easily.


I'm still not ready to discuss gauge pins, but clearly I had a bit more success with them today as I was at least able to produce consistent prints. I probably just need to investigate some pins that are easier to work with - perhaps the ones I have are particularly irritating.

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 3/27/09: Talons (Bloc Party). We're going to see them tomorrow night at the Aragon. YES!

Lessons From The First Day of (Attempted) Printing

Wearing my trusty Friday overalls and acceptably indie/chic This American Life tee, I set about my first real day of letterpress troubleshooting on the Pilot.

Lesson #1: Me and gauge pins? Not friends. I'm assuming that since we don't know each other very well our relationship can only improve. But right now we're not really speaking to each other.

I'm super paranoid about denting my Boxcar base, and I'm not really sure which parts of the pins should absolutely NOT contact the base. I'm also not 100% sure about which parts are supposed to hold the paper, and they just never seem particularly secure to me. I'll probably do a whole post specifically about these little fuckers, but right now we need some space.

Lesson #2: Taping the rails is fairly painless, and has fast results.

When I first started inking the plate for my "shit / i'm sorry" notecard, ink was getting all over the place. In the Boxcar video on taping the rails, the guy uses some fancy nylon strapping tape, which I don't have at the moment but may look into. Instead I added about 4 layers of scotch tape to the rails to raise the rollers a bit. This improved things dramatically, but there were still some places being inked that shouldn't have been. Another layer or two, and the plate was inking perfectly.


Lesson #3: I have a lot to learn about packing a platen press.

The first couple of prints I pulled, there seemed to be good ink coverage around the edges but not in the middle. So, I kept adding more and more packing thinking it must be the problem. However, the more packing I added the less even the print was. After a few hours, only about the bottom half of the print was coming through clearly. What the hell? I even tried using makeready buried under the tympan just under the top half of the print, but then things got even screwier. Finally, I thought "this can't be right" as my packing bulged and there was barely any OOMPH when I pulled the arm to print.

So, I went backwards about 11 steps and left only a small amount of packing. This did the trick for the most part, and I didn't even have to use any additional sheeting under a specific section of the print. I'm sure all of this has some very technical explanation to do with pressue distribution, but I'm just not used to such things yet having mainly worked on flatbed presses. Exhausted but somewhat accomplished, I finally produced a mostly acceptable print:


Lesson #4: The jury is still out on print quality and smudginess, but water-based ink cleanup sure is a breeze.

Seriously, 90% of the ink came off using no solvent whatsoever. I used a small amount of vegetable oil towards the end just to make sure everything was ship shape, and no stinky mineral spirits (which I'd like to avoid in the interest of preventing future flipper babies). I'll have to wait for the test prints to dry before I can really speak to the smudginess factor, and I'm not 100% thrilled with the ink coverage. However, the colors are nice and I think it's worth continued testing.

Lesson #5: My neck hurts.

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 3/20/09: Take Back The City (Snow Patrol), Don't Drag Me Down (Social Distortion). Yeah, Mike Ness rocks balls. I wonder if he needs anything letterpressed.

A Fresh Start

Today I spent most of my time cleaning and reorganizing my office/studio, which really needed to be done. I've been attempting a massive purge of unused craft supplies in order to create more empty surfaces upon which to work. I'm pretty much done, and as you can see my closet now closely resembles the one in The Berenstein Bears And The Messy Room. This book clearly marked me as a child, and I blame all my perfectionist tendencies on it.

My letterpress and paper making studio area is small, but working for now. I've got the most basic (and cheapest) table from Ikea holding the Pilot, drying rack, and composing area. Below is boxey storage for paper, furniture, paper making supplies, and other stuff. Above I've just installed a nifty wall shelf unit that's very functional but also cool looking. I use it to store design related books, letterpress bits and bobs, and a few objets d'art.

On another side of the room I've got another desk (this one nicer, from Crate and Barrel) that holds my paper drying press and paper cutter. I intended for the Ikea table to also be where I could make paper, but now that I see the arrangement I might be a little nervous about getting so much water so close to my cast iron press. So, actual paper making may be relegated to the dining room until I can get a "real" studio.

And speaking of other spaces, today I received a text message picture of my 8 x 12 C&P, which has now been officially moved into it's "home" in the warehouse at my design job. It looks like from the picture that it's near a big window, which will be nice and maybe not make me feel too "warehoused." Storage above and to the sides - now I've just got to get Paul Aken to come help me get it up and running. Very exciting!!



Next order of business: I got my new rollers in from Roll Crafters. They were very nice and helpful on the phone, and a few weeks back I shipped them my existing rollers so they could use the cores and see the trucks before making new rollers. They finally arrived this week, and boy did they do a job with the shipping packaging! It took me a solid 10 minutes to unwrap the layers of cardboard, which were literally screwed into end blocks of wood, which themselves had holes drilled in them to keep the rollers steady. I certainly appreciate them making sure they wouldn't get damaged during shipping. The first picture is what the rollers looked like when I finally got them out of the box, with my trucks taped to the ends. Next is after I popped them out of the wood blocks, and finally after I unwrapped the paper around them. Beauties!

I did a quick ink and print just to test them out, with the same type I had locked up earlier. I'll definitely have to do a bit of troubleshooting - there were a few issues with the rollers inking the furniture in the chase, and the whole process being a little sticky. I think I initially may have had the rollers in the wrong graboids (technical term) so after switching them things seemed a little smoother. This was after I had already cleaned the press, though, so I didn't test them again yet.

I can't remember if this was happening with the old rollers, but they seem to get stuck at the bottom of the chase before the arm is all the way back up. I can push the arm up, but I feel like they should be able to continue all the way to the bottom by themselves. I'll probably ask Paul when I see him.



Here's right where they get stuck:

And here's where they end up when the arm is all the way up:

The trucks appear to be mostly in line with the pieces they roll against, though slightly off. I wonder if this has something to do with it.




All in all, a very productive day...and I can't wait to start pressing my "Dead Things" onto these nifty coasters I just received. I'm waiting on my Akua water based inks to arrive to test those out - though they mentioned there could be some concern with the inks smearing from "sweaty hands." Obviously not the best choice for coasters, but I'll try them on some note cards and gift tags. I've also recently been told that rubber inks can be cleaned with crisco and vegetable oil, so that might be an option too. WOO!