Building a Printing Press

My sculpture class too a field trip to a scrap yard to find metal objects for a welding project. Besides a few pieces of square stock I came across what appears to be some sort of industrial press (possible for flattening small rolls of metal?). My excitement peeked when I realized that the machine was only a few minor modifications away from a small printing press, something I was planning to one day build from scratch. Now I basically had every piece I would need. The bonus: The woman showing us around had “a soft spot for the arts”, and decided to donate all we could scrounge up to the cause. In other words letting us get away with what had to be half a ton of metal for free! What a generous woman.

Taking the machine back to the workshop, me and a friend, Mark Reedy (basically my studio assistant in the project, ha-ha), started to take the thing apart so we could clean off the beautiful light coating of rust and mud that build up over its time in the elements. A wondrous occasion I can only describe as “Man Time”, a bonding experience where guys build stuff.

So far the progress is smooth going, with only a few hitches concerning the workshop’s lack of tools, but it seems we have all the parts we’ll need to make the press, which is quite exciting. The downside, however, is that the project doesn’t particularly pertain to the assignment at hand, so I’ll have to devote the majority of my time and effort to a second project, pushing the progress of this one to one day a week we’ve set aside.

I plan to document the progress of the project on this blog with images and the occasional shaky-cam video, so stay tuned.

The bearing housing that allows the raising and lowering the main roller to specific height is identical to a printing press. What a good find!

If you have any idea what this machines real purpose was, please let me know!