You made me ink...

Yes, that is a Finding Nemo reference.

We've spent quite a bit of time over the last weeks debating the pros and cons of the various types of ink one can use in Letterpress printing.

The main options are Oil-based, Rubber-based, Soy-based or Water-based, which all have their positives and negatives, and you can certainly find champions and detractors for each type of ink. There's a great discussion of the salient points over here on Inky Dog Press, if you're interested in reading further.

Given that we're only going to be printing in our kitchen (to start with at least), we figured that having to clean up with solvents probably wasn't ideal, and so decided to stick with water washable inks for now. Of course, not using solvents for clean-up also has much less of a negative impact environmentally, which certainly makes me happy.

We've elected to go with these Caligo Safe Wash Relief Inks:

The advantage of these coming in tubes minimizes the amount of wastage from skinning over that we would see in a tin, as when the ink is exposed to air, it will start to dry out.

We're trying to be strict with ourselves about not splurging too much money on this new hobby, so we decided to go with 5 basic colours for now, as above. These will combine to give us more than enough range for our initial experiments though, I'm sure.

Next post we'll actually get to some printing, I promise!

We're rollin'

Our lovely rollers have arrived for the Adana, so we're almost ready to go! Getting the 'proper' ones from Caslon wasn't cheap, but really worth it to know we have the best quality rollers.

Adana 8x5 Refurb Part I

Being keen to get started printing as soon as we possibly can (we're like kids waiting for Christmas), we spent most of this last weekend tinkering with our lovely little press.

As per my last post, we bought an Adana 8x5 letterpress from ebay, she's been stored in a garage since before I was born and is looking a rusty, dusty ol' mess, poor thing.

This first go was really just a tester, to get the press cleaned up and get our eye in as to how it all goes together. I'm delighted and really rather surprised to tell you that we managed to get everything reassembled and working again with no bits leftover at all. A small achievement by some people's standards perhaps, but for me, this was nothing sort of miraculous.

So, here's the level of grubiness we started with:

Ready to go:

Disassembly begins. Sam Boy spent quite a bit of time considering and planning and saying things like "now let's just think about this", where I was more "oh just hit it with a hammer!". A combo of these approaches worked well:

The point of no return (I'll admit, I was worried):

Clean-up begins (I got to be drier-upper, thank goodness):

The serial number is revealed under the grime:

Quick break for lunch:

(only kidding, obvs, we're soaking the nuts and bolts in vinegar)

All clean!:

You don't see this so often these days:

The following day, reassembly begins:

Umm, is that all the bits?

And ta da!! Here's where we're at for now:

The eagle-eyed amongst you will spot that we're still missing a few key components, most importantly the rollers, we'll be buying those new this week, hopefully.

We decided against re-painting for now, as we were rather concerned that in the time that took we might forget how to put the damn thing back together again! We've got the spray paint ready to go though (a brighter red than this, but still sympathetic I think), so that's a job for another time.

We also decided against putting the ink duct bit back on, as it was kind of rusted beyond all rescue, and initially at least, is above and beyond our requirements. 

The process of taking the press apart and putting her back together again has been a real eye-opener for me. Not only am I not quite as useless as I thought, it has only served to increase my estimation of this wonderful little machine. The press is so elegant in its simplicity, so well made, so logical, I cannot wait to get started printing... I just want to hug it! But it's a bit oily and kind of spiky. 

Ok, that's enough for now. More to follow when the rollers arrive. Woohoo!! 

By way of an introduction

Hello.

My name is Sam. I'm 30 years old and live in Hertfordshire, UK, with my husband (also called Sam) and our Bengal cat, Basil. We both work in London, myself in children's publishing, my husband in software design.

We've recently been gripped by a rather consuming obsession with all things letterpress related. Thank goodness it's both of us, I dread to think of the rows it could cause otherwise, it's looking to be rather an expensive hobby...

Our interest began when we had a our wedding invitations letterpressed last year:

We designed them ourselves and they were printed by a very nice man at KDP Promotions.

The next major bucket of fuel on the fire was the letterpress workshop we attended, run by the lovely folk at Turnbull Grey. It was a great morning, and left us very thirsty for more...

Here's me having a first go on an Adana 8x5. Loving the zingy orange, mixing the inks was one of my favourite parts:

An impressive collection of vintage wooden type:

My "Kim's Cabin" sign all locked-up and inked on the proof press, ready to print. Kim's Cabin is my mum's little craft business. More on that once her website is up and running:

The proof press in action. I'll be honest, I needed help, it's a weighty beast and I am as pathetic as I look:

This was Sam Boy's poster, our cats as DJs, I love it:

I even managed to squeeze in a little Sherlock number for myself:

An awesome day, all told.

That was at the beginning of June. So neither of us counting patience amongst our virtues, we've already bought ourselves an Adana Eight-Five from ebay to refurbish over the summer. This rusty old gal here:

I'll leave the detailed posts on this for another day.

Over the coming months I'll be blogging about our forays into the world of letterpress, as well as anything else we may have going on - we're currently renovating our house, as and when we can afford to, so there might be a bit of that as well.

If you're more interested in cats than printing or DIY (fair enough), then Basil has his own blog, right over here. Look at his handsome face: