Printing experiment

So here it is, our first printing experiment. I'm really pleased with how it went, though it was rather a shock quite how much 'fiddling' is necessary before you can get anything like a decent print.

We have a very limited stock of type at the moment, basically some nice big Gill Sans numerical digits, and a random selection of other lead type, none of which forms a complete alphabet! The lead type came with the Adana press we bought, all jumbled up (or 'pied', to be technical) in a big crate, and we've not finished going through it yet.

So, with this rather sad selection of stock, the best we could come up with was this:

24 is our house number, and Basil is the name of our cat, so this sort of makes sense. Ish.

The platen needs to be 'packed' before printing, usually with newsprint and the exciting sounding 'tympan paper'. If you're total amateurs on a first run, this amounts to chopped up Evening Standard and sketch book paper. We'll do it properly eventually. Honest.

We decided to go with a nice classic black for our first printing, we don't really have a surface on which to mix inks yet, and even though our kitchen is still to be 'done', we don't want to actually trash it. Here are the rollers inking up... it's gorgeous stuff printing ink, really glossy and tacky and viscous. I kind of wanted to eat it. Probably not the best idea.

We managed to make a few rookie errors, including not moving the gripper bar (that's the crossbar bit) up high enough to be out of the way of the type, which is very naughty, we're lucky we didn't damage the type. I don't have a photo of that, too ashamed.

As you can see, we had to run through quite a lot of proofs before we finally got something that looked alright. Both of us were astounded by the extent to which the most infinitesimal adjustments to the position of the platen (it's controlled by 4 screws at the back) can affect the look of the print.

Here we are mid-process. Had to move to the floor as our dining table is too wobbly:

 Here's the finished product (not a masterpiece, but not bad for a trial run):

And here it is being modelled by our cat Basil. As you can see, he's really enthusiastic about the whole thing:

 Hopefully it won't be too long before we can lay our hands on some more type and start producing prints that actually have a reason to exist. Sadly, due to the fact that no-one's making it anymore, type is extortionately expensive, so we may have to be a patient!